How WE feel

[ilyce200]

I'm writing an article for my zine on teachers and how students feel towards them. Please leave a reply and contribute to my zine.

[Darthmat]

More specific request?

[ilyce200]

I'm just looking for comments about teachers. Nothing specific.

[KittyKatBlack]

Teachers are human. They're just as ignorant and just as caring as anybody else. They're just annoying to us because we have to deal with them almost every day.

[cooltoonist]

Teachers aren't really "teachers". They're just there to patrol and make sure you do your work. Most teacher just take work out of a book, not from their heads, and are slaves to the curriculum.

As mentioned, they're humans. Unfortunately, their conscience believes they're doing good for the students.

[SoulRiser]

Depends on the teacher. There are some I respect, and some I can't stand, and the rest are at various stages inbetween. They're just like other people, only they have quite a bit of power over students, and as the saying goes, "Power tends to corrupt". The teachers I've respected the most were generally the ones who used their power the least. I didn't meet anyone who was completely immune to it, though.

[akdonn]

The exact quote that SoulRiser stated is: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It is attributed to Lord Action from a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in April 1887.

Imagine that, 121 years ago THIS MONTH!

To answer the question: I think, as a teacher myself, that a lot of teachers are just people who are looking for a form of employment that is an extension of being a parent; they got kids, they generally like kids, they want to make a difference in kid's lives, so they become teachers. The power thing is part of needing to control students the way they need to control their own kids--because their kids are a kind of possession.

Our system of public education in the U.S. is based on an agricultural model that was established back when people mostly worked in farming and needed the summers off to bring in the crops. In the fall the kids went to school because they weren't needed as much on the farm and there were some basic things they needed to learn (The three Rs--Readin', Ritin', and 'Rithmetic) but it wasn't a big priority.

With the Industrial Revolution of the 1900s education became more urbanized and guys like John Dewey argued for more flexible learning opportunities and involvement of the community in the schools. While previously a lot of parents didn't really see why they needed to send their kids to school, the ideas of "progressive education" led to schools being established virtually everywhere in the country and attendance at certain ages being mandatory. Part of this was because it was believed that our form of government depended upon voters being able to understand how our system worked in order to elect capable leaders.

Today public school teachers are mostly government workers who get a college degree and attend at least a year more of training to become certified by the state. Public Education is still mostly controlled at the local level by school boards, however, and because of their powerful union teachers in this country are not measured by the quality of their teaching but by their ability to make it from day to day in a classroom with a bunch of ever more difficult brats--who are the result of an "entitlement society."

Perhaps if there was a "merit" system for teachers, the bad teachers would go away. Perhaps if parents could decide for themselves what public school they want their kid to attend, the schools would compete for students and improve. Perhaps if school was year-round and kids were sorted into vocational occupational schools if they didn't have a chance of going to college, then teachers would be more effective. Unfortunately, the system of public education is so big, and so expensive, and so in-grown, that change comes very slowly. Teachers might someday be part of finding a better way to serve the need to educate future citizens, but as it is now teachers are a big part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is parents.