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Home : 2003 : Jul : 24
I have been teaching for 5 years in various inner-city districts around the country. I am so sick and tired of people getting on people who want to leave the teaching profession for legitimate reasons!!!! the public school system in America as it currently exists has to change. Can you imagine hospitals and businesses being run the same way they were even twenty years ago!!! WHy is it that when people make legitimate complaints about education, people start telling them you're not dedicated and don't care about children. Everyone knows that teachers are some of the most repressed and powerless people in the world. We complain about working conditons, but you don't see us doing anything collectively to make a statement. I have recently seen administartors who didn't like a teacher damn near run her out of the school because of some personal vendettas they had against her. They were disrespectful and rude to her in front of her students which made her job difficult. She was a good teacher and transferred to another school. How can we teach children about respecting people's differences and freedom of speech about legitimate concerns, when teachers are persecuted and tortured every day because they spoke their minds? This is why the children don't respect us. They know that we don't have too much power. If someone doesn't do something about this problem, you are going to see some teachers going off on the deep edge. I was reading a book called High Stakes and it mentions how a teacher who was unfairly evaluated was planning to physically harm the principal, until a mentor teacher heard about the problema dn reported it. This is what makes people leave because they know that there aren't going to be any real changes made in education that need to be made to improve the system. i think that these teachers concerns are valuable and will be a crucial part to changing the system. If we don't feel the need or want to change the system, then waht are we teaching for? Why did the Civil Rights Movement take place, why did The American Revolution take place? Why even bother to teach students about civic duty, democracy, and change if they can't see it in our schools? Most children and teachers hate schools because of a lot of the conditions such as 1 or 2 disruptive students monopolizing all of the instructional and learning time, inadequate supplies, no field trips or recess, standardized testing misuse and punitive consequences because of these test scores. i could go on and on, but I think people can understand my point. It is time for teachers in the U.S. to get off our asses and write their Conresmen and find out other things that they can do to get help in improving our field. Albert Einstein once said "Problems cannot be changed at the same level of consciousness that created them." Frederick Douglass once said, "Power concedes nothing without demand." If these men had the attitude that nothing will chamge, I can't do anything about these issues faced by myself and others where would our world be today?
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