This is a big reason why I don’t teach. In the radical days when I was getting certified to teach, we were told there was a difference between educators and propagandists. For the new generations, the memorized response (Laugh here.) was educators taught how, and propagandists taught what to think. True to doublespeak expectations, those assuming the slots once held by educators, who called themselves teachers, are now propagandists who call themselves educators. I digress.
The educators in Macon County got together for some herd mentality. The NCAE did some educating with the educators before the meeting to organize them. Then, said educators wore shirts that said, “We Love Public Education.” Those who spoke opposed state cuts to public education.
Well, most people love education, but real educators improvise. I grew up in a world where 25-30 students per class was the norm. Sure, nowadays the little animals are way more out of hand, and everybody’s speaking a different language, but that’s why the schools have all the extra social workers and specialists, isn’t it?
I taught math and physics, and I never submitted a purchase order. I was lucky because math and physics are all around us. Sure, photogate timers and such are great, but wax tape and doorbells show the same principles in better detail. Rotational inertia? Lucky I had arms and hands to put things in motion. Gravity? Funny, it never failed us.
Now when we get to this diversity and orientation stuff, maybe they are so expensive and needy of teaching tools because they don’t exist and cannot be demonstrated in the real world. I maintain my ground that we whine, but we don’t know what poor is in this country.
I was reading today about a simpler time in a book published by the historic society in my adopted home town (information available upon request):
The school district was poor. One of the first questions one of the teachers who had been here before asked at our first teachers’ meeting was something like, ‘If they run out of money to pay us, will we just get up to a pay day and not get paid, or will we be alerted ahead of time that you don’t have the money to pay us?’ They never did run out of money to pay us.
The children had to buy their own books, and I remember very well a certain mother in town who had five children and her husband worked at one of the grocery stores which was not a high paying job. But she always had the money to come up the first day of school to buy whatever secondhand books her children needed. Once the secondhand books were gone, you had to buy new ones that cost more.
Imagine. A family of seven, surviving on a low-paying job, yet having enough to feed five little mouths and buy books, too! Oh, and unwed teachers just expected to live in boarding houses. Did I digress enough for you?
