WHAT TEACHERS SHOULD AND DON'T KNOW

I'm a teacher.  I'm dedicated to my profession and I love everyday in my classroom with my students.  The main problem with my profession is political solutions to everyday problems.  I don't want to say I have a corner on the job of educating students, but I think I have some insights about teaching.  So, I'll give you the rules for my classroom.  Not for students, but for teachers. 


1.  It's not your job to tell students WHAT to think.  How dare you think that you are so right that you need to tell students what to think and that you disrespect them so much that you don't allow them to think for themselves.  JUSTIFICATION: Most teachers have never had a job outside the classroom.  They don't have a perspective on real life.  Remember this, school only prepares you to think.  It doesn't prepare you to live.  You have to DO that.  Along the way you'll take some hits, get bloodied, and find out that life isn't fair.  The only thing that's fair is that you'll get a fair shot to succeed.  We can't guarantee the outcome.  Sorry.




2.  You need to impress on your students that being on time, dressing well, doing good work, and getting it done on time will greatly increase your chance of succeeding. JUSTIFICATION:  If you as a teacher are late to school or class, if you don't return student's graded work in a timely manner, and you don't dress well for your job, how do you expect them to do it if you don't?




3. You're a teacher.  Grow up.  I have heard the chorus of whining from teachers and it's not attractive.  The fact that teachers are a part of a union that constantly portrays teachers as victims of a system, while supporting politicians who exploit victimization is unconscionable.  JUSTIFICATION: The NEA isn't a union, it's a political action committee for a party that relishes victimization making the NEA "useful idiots" for the Democrat party.




4.  Remember this: Not everyone works 184 days a year and has summers off.  While I don't dislike it, I understand that most people don't appreciate that teachers with the benefits they have, whine about how hard they have it.  JUSTIFICATION: I worked on a police force for 26 years.  I didn't get summers off, I worked whether it snowed or not, and I had a set of rules I had to follow or I faced the consequences.  Proving that my students really do learn doesn't bother me.



5.  My dad went to work for 38 years to the same job, one that he hated.  He did it because he wanted to take care of his family.  He told me when I was young, don't go to work some place that you hate.  Go to school or get the training necessary to work at something you love.  That was great advice and I followed it twice.  He also said it was honorable to serve your country in the military.  I did that too.



6.  School districts should make their students learn by making them work hard.  Don't allow them to slack off.  Courses that give students "college credit" in high school without having to prove what they know on a test, usually are BS, because the colleges offering the credit are tying the students to their school.  By giving them credit, these colleges are ensuring that students will enroll in their school because most of the credits don't readily transfer to other schools.  These schools are ensuring their enrollment will be steady.  Worse, the class standards for learning are a joke.   Shameful.




7. Common Core is an atrocity.  It's all about federalizing education.  At the beginning of public education in the 19th century, all education was local.  Each community took on the responsibility of educating their children.  The system worked quite well for the better part of 75 years.  As the great LBJ and the federal government began taking over more and more parts of everyday life for Americans, education was in their sights.  I firmly believe that the government has co-opted education because they are attempting to inculcate progressivism in the children of our country.


JUSTIFICATION: The colleges of education graduates teachers who are ill-prepared to teach anything but a curriculum that is bankrupt of the American ideals upon which this country was founded. If you control the teachers, you control the future.  The stuff that is taught in American classrooms by these progressive automatons is frightening.  They have no sense of their country's history.  They learn that America is a wicked, imperialist country, that has done nothing in its history but oppress people.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.




America represents an ideal of freedom and liberty.  It took us a while to get to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but we've arrived, turning around thousands of years of human history.  No other country has done what America has in the history of humankind.  America changed the world. 


We have a written Constitution that spells out our rights.  Great Britain has none. We have a contract between the people and their government.  No other country has that.  We have a document that disperses power among three branches of government so that no one person can ever seize power, despite Obama's best efforts.  The Supreme Court has repeatedly slapped him down.


Our children need to know that America is truly exceptional.  They don't get that in most classrooms.  They'll hear that in my classroom.  Screw Common Core.