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I'm so tired of hearing how great teachers are. The president finally stands up and says, yeah we have bad teachers and they need to be dealt with and we need to make it easier for districts to do that. Then everyone starts saying, oh woe is the teacher lots of work and no pay for teaching unruly and stupid children. Would people really rather believe children are universally unruly and stupid [or constantly distracted] rather than believe we have some terrible teachers? Or maybe they each think their child is a genius angel while other people's children are the bad ones. Or maybe because teachers, the good ones, are truly important so people are willing to put up with more. It's probably all of the above and then some.
Believe it or not, there are a lot more bad teachers than what you hear about. Some times, as with my third grade teacher, they've been there too long and no matter the number of complaints the school board can't do anything. It took other teachers, and about 10 years, complaining about hearing this bad teacher screaming all the way down the hallway for the school board to act. And at that all they could do was force this teacher into early retirement, which was only "early" by a few years.
Now she was a bad teacher. But sometimes you get teachers that just aren't that great. In fact if you added up all the bad teachers and all the not-so-great teachers, they would, by far, out number the OK and good teachers. This isn't from my experiences, at four different school districts, alone. I try to stay on top of news about bad teachers and this is something that is coming to light more and more often.
Bad teachers are the main reason I'm seriously considering homeschooling my daughter. Though I've heard things have changed in our school district I just can't get one small incident out of my head. Not so long ago my niece was in kindergarten. She was a surprisingly well behaved child for being so young. The teacher's assistant, who was going on to become a teacher, got rude with my niece one day. Long story short, my niece was pretending to drink from a fake plastic [toy] pop can. Naturally play acting, she made exaggerated gulping/swallowing sounds. Rather than inform the 5 year old of proper manners since it was so obviously bothersome, the assistant yelled at my niece. She made the poor kid feel very badly about herself and for a while refused to play in the play house, where she was playing acting with the pop.
Even if things have made a significant improvement since I graduated, it hasn't been enough. Especially when a parent brings up a teacher's assistant's questionable actions and the teacher refuses to even look into them, automatically dismissing the parent. That is not the kind of place I want my child to go to.
This article is cross posted from Jen's blog; Different But Determined.
