re: #594 alexknyc

I’ve been a teacher for 25 years. I’d like to think I’m an educator, but maybe I’m deluded.

Where do you get the idea I’m some kind of conservative ideologue?

I really think you have me mixed up with someone else here.

basically because of this statement:

I hear you.

I have ninth grade Algebra students who can’t add or subtract fractions, ninth and tenth grade World History students who don’t realize the Romans didn’t have fighter jets and eleventh grade American History students who’ve never read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

But their previous teachers are tenured and get good performance evaluations. Frankly, it’s a disgrace.

Which gave me the impression that you don’t seem to understand that it’s not actually the teacher’s fault if a kid that is in a bad point in their lives hasn’t read the declaration of indepdendence. That that doesn’t matter to a kid if they have a poor home life.

It basically sounds like talking points straight up to me, so I just assumed you were doing the same thing as researchok and whoever else on this board who just reflexively blames teachers for performance across the board and thinks that the problem lies more or lesscompletely with teachers and unions.

So if you’re a teacher, maybe you just haven’t seen it from the angle of knowing all the incredibly smart kids who were called bad kids because they didn’t prioritize school. None of their teachers did anything wrong, they were simply not learning for other reasons.

That’s the disgrace. That we have so many wrecked kids with ignorant and abusive families.

I can’t imagine where I’d end up if I was a queer kid with abusive or absentee parents. I certainly wouldn’t have been focusing on school.

I knew a sort of “lost boys” group of kids that I hung out with on BBSes, who were on a bulletin board system I called regularly. One of them was learning assembly code and how to access commodore 64 drives through the serial port to experiment with networking. In high school. With no money. Learning how to do shit that today would earn you 6 figures, and he could do it. Wrote his own BBS system. WROTE HIS OWN! Sound like anyone we know?

And he was a teenager who got drunk, smoked weed, got into fights, mouthed off to teachers, and hung out on this bulletin board system named after one of the worst neighborhoods in South Seattle. Where the lived. This BS was where I hung out, and a bunch of other people like this kid hung out. Smart kids who created almost their own “gang” of nerds, a social support group because their parents were gone, they were bad, they were whatever horror you could imagine.

So the yuk yuk this kid doesn’t know the declartraion of independence shit?

yeah. I knew that kid. I knew a few kids like that.

And you know what?

That kid was FAR smarter than you, or me. The declaration of independence to a kid who’s being abused who’s basically putting all his energy into artistic pursuits or nerd pursuits as escapism? The declaratuon of independence is as meaningless as toilet paper. Staying mentally healthy and avoiding getting beat up is a little more important than that.