bravo for this kid stating a very serious issue with teaching and one i agree with but i think his ire may be directed at the wrong person as @Yogi suggested and @JiggaJonson implied.

i substituted for a brief span a few years ago.
the reason my time was brief was not due to the kids,they were fantastic but rather it was the draconian and administrative bullshit i had to put up with.the school system was not looking for a substitute "teacher" but a babysitter.a warm body to sit in class and watch kids become catatonic. reading "packets" and qwell any form of disruption.

i was "officially reprimanded" three times due to actually engaging the classes i was substituting.my crime was not the fact i was covering material the absent teacher had already gone over recently but rather that i was talking and engaging the students.

seriously? it still boggles my mind.the teachers who i covered were appreciative of my efforts but the school only wanted me to keep the seat warm.

interestingly enough,those very same teachers convinced me to volunteer my time to tutor troubled teens who are constantly in ISS (in school suspension).thanks to a new principal who helped push through the massive paperwork and help from these teachers this may become an actual program.we have enlisted two more teachers who have come out of retirement and hope to have more tutors soon who are willing to donate their time.

the irony in all this is that the we (the tutors) have huge latitude in how we teach these troubled teens while vetted teachers have huge restrictions.

so generally speaking:its not the teachers.its the system.

I think the difference between a teacher and a good teacher is that a good teacher gives a shit about their students' futures. I had the misfortune of having teachers (not all, but most) who treated it like a job instead of an honour or responsibility. I make a point of meeting with teachers (my brother's, my nephews/nieces, and my kids teachers) as much as I can. I usually won't go off on them if I disagree, but it does help me understand what role they will assume with their students, and if it will be necessary for me to supplement the kids education.

A young persons outlook on life is more often than not cemented into permanence by the time they graduate from high school. Some will change and blossom into more open-minded folks later in life, but not too many.

If there is one thing that bothers me even more than complacent teachers, it's complacent parents. I really don't like it when parents don't push their kids, but where I come from it happens far too often.

One thing I want to teach my kids (that I learned from my parents) is that as young people they will have the opportunity to push their peers if they think it's merited. I was able to help some peers who had hardscrabble upbringings in their childhood, and it can make a difference.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by Throbbin:
Enoch - bravo!


We need more teachers like Enoch. The robots might as well go work in a factory somewhere.


thanks man!
i am not the smartest man nor the most educated,in fact i was a horrible student.i fell into teaching late in life and found a genuine passion for it.
i taught comparative religions for two years but as i have told others,this was an elective class for adults.
when the alternative school for teens lost funding i went into the public school system at the behest of dr carlos.
i loved it the first day.
to teach adults is one thing but to have so many young minds ready to be jump started is a whole new arena and i was excited!
i lasted 6 maybe 7 weeks in that school.
not due to the kids..they were GREAT.
it was the other teachers and the administrators who had a problem with me.
not with my kids test scores,nor their assignments.
it was due to the fact that i was not following the precise dictates of NCLB and how i was expected to deliver that curriculum.
my argument was that if my students were doing well on the mandatory quizzes,which is a crucial to federal funding,who CARES how i taught them?
the school board took issue with,what they called "my attitude".
i was told i needed to grade my kids notebooks...i refused,because it has no bearing on what they have learned and is irrelevant.
i was told i could not grade them on participation...i argued that is crucially more vital than a notebook.
i was written up three times for supposed "prejudicial teaching practices",which was only my strategy in getting a lazy thinker to stop being lazy.
what i was doing is the first 20 minutes of the period i would have the class discuss how a historical event could be related to a current event.(my way of interjecting civics).
if a student regurgitated a textbook answer i knew he/she was trying to slip by with only rudimentary understanding of what we were covering.
so i would hammer that student the entire period and make an example of that student.
embarrassing? maybe
uncomfortable?most likely
will they come to my class ill prepared again?
never in a million years.
i also got into trouble for adding three bonus questions on every quiz that were worth 10%.
they were essay questions that i wanted in the students own words.
this was more for the kids that maybe didnt take tests well and i gave an opportunity to reveal that they did have a nominal understanding of the material and hence could bolster their grade a tad.
i also graded on participation.
if you did well on tests but didnt interact with the class i counted that against you.
that got me into some hot water also.
the school system was not looking for a teacher but a warm body to take attendance.
not for that kind of money or any amount of money.
now i tutor my friends kids when they need it.
of course i dont get paid but thats not what is important.
what IS important is to get these kids excited and curious.to become passionate about learning.
that, in itself, is a pretty big bonus in my book.
till next time.
namaste.

In reply to this comment by Throbbin:
Enoch - bravo!


We need more teachers like Enoch. The robots might as well go work in a factory somewhere.


thanks man!
i am not the smartest man nor the most educated,in fact i was a horrible student.i fell into teaching late in life and found a genuine passion for it.
i taught comparative religions for two years but as i have told others,this was an elective class for adults.
when the alternative school for teens lost funding i went into the public school system at the behest of dr carlos.
i loved it the first day.
to teach adults is one thing but to have so many young minds ready to be jump started is a whole new arena and i was excited!
i lasted 6 maybe 7 weeks in that school.
not due to the kids..they were GREAT.
it was the other teachers and the administrators who had a problem with me.
not with my kids test scores,nor their assignments.
it was due to the fact that i was not following the precise dictates of NCLB and how i was expected to deliver that curriculum.
my argument was that if my students were doing well on the mandatory quizzes,which is a crucial to federal funding,who CARES how i taught them?
the school board took issue with,what they called "my attitude".
i was told i needed to grade my kids notebooks...i refused,because it has no bearing on what they have learned and is irrelevant.
i was told i could not grade them on participation...i argued that is crucially more vital than a notebook.
i was written up three times for supposed "prejudicial teaching practices",which was only my strategy in getting a lazy thinker to stop being lazy.
what i was doing is the first 20 minutes of the period i would have the class discuss how a historical event could be related to a current event.(my way of interjecting civics).
if a student regurgitated a textbook answer i knew he/she was trying to slip by with only rudimentary understanding of what we were covering.
so i would hammer that student the entire period and make an example of that student.
embarrassing? maybe
uncomfortable?most likely
will they come to my class ill prepared again?
never in a million years.
i also got into trouble for adding three bonus questions on every quiz that were worth 10%.
they were essay questions that i wanted in the students own words.
this was more for the kids that maybe didnt take tests well and i gave an opportunity to reveal that they did have a nominal understanding of the material and hence could bolster their grade a tad.
i also graded on participation.
if you did well on tests but didnt interact with the class i counted that against you.
that got me into some hot water also.
the school system was not looking for a teacher but a warm body to take attendance.
not for that kind of money or any amount of money.
now i tutor my friends kids when they need it.
of course i dont get paid but thats not what is important.
what IS important is to get these kids excited and curious.to become passionate about learning.
that, in itself, is a pretty big bonus in my book.
till next time.
namaste.

"Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state.

For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader--the barbarians enter Rome."

- Robert A. Heinlein

I've got a more relevant post:

Why would anyone want a deuche bag like Specter in their party?

...I mean besides the fact that he's a warm body, does he bring anything to the table?

>> ^MarineGunrock:

First, let me say I appreciate your honest attempt at "tearing me a new one". Compared to other replies, yours is a gem (a diamond with 250 written on it). You asked me some non-rhetorical questions, and I will gladly answer those that my two previous replies haven't, as they were not specifically aimed at your criticisms.

Oh, so having a college degree automatically exempts you from being lowlife scum

Sigh. Obviously not. You quoted me as saying "Not to say there aren't lowlifes in corporate America,". Did you not read the full quote or are you ignoring it on purpose? In the latter case, at least don't quote the embarrassing contradictory bit.

I'd rather have my blue-collar job over sitting in a tiny fucking cubicle any day.

Maybe so, and you may well hold a moral "relatively high" ground by doing so as far as I am concerned, but in light of america's global pursuit of economical happiness, I consider pretty much all jobs inside the U.S.A and some parts of Canada as "corporate". My usage of "corporate America" here was both a rhetorical and a conceptual synecdoche that played on the ambiguity of adjective-noun compound nouns in English (out of context, "corporate America" could mean both "the corporations of America as a whole" or "the whole of America as a corporation"). Sorry for the misunderstanding here, as usage should have required quotation marks to show I didn't use the idiomatic expression "corporate America" in its commonly accepted technical sense.

So now you're calling America's greatest generation lowlife scum? I would think that the veterans of WWII deserve nothing but honor and respect for their actions, and you should too.

I do respect them, and tried to make sure that what I said could not be construed as showing disrespect towards veterans of the two World Wars. Yet you have done so with a comment that is taken completely out of context as I implied it applied only to an ENLISTED army, specifically this one that is stationed in Iraq. As I pointed out, conscripts (and other time-of-war enlistees) are a different matter altogether. If you think they're not, may I just point out that officially, the United States has not been at war with anyone since WWII? Not in Korea, not in Vietnam and certainly not in both Iraqi "operations". The Congress may have voted funds and whatnot, but that is not War according to any international definition. Thus, only WWI and WWII will stand as examples of real modern wars with conscripts and ethically justified enlistment. Also, see my second post.

If it wasn't for them, you'd all be speaking German and saluting the Swastika right now.

Overused red herring. Please think of the Nazis and their children!

How can someone that honestly doesn't know of back-room politics and abuse of fellow humans be low life scum?

It is called guilt by ignorance (in christian terms, "Vincible Ignorance". Ask a theologian near you) You can be condemned in court as a consequence of it, if it can be shown that while you could have known the law, you didn't make the effort to for whatever reason (normally, you're suppose to know all law, but let's say you try to argue that it was somehow absolutely impossible for you to know it and that this should somehow absolve you of any wrongdoing). See also the concepts of "pluralistic ignorance" and of the bystander effect.

What if he did know about it?

Then that makes him guilty by association if he could prevent wrongdoing or if he refused to denounce it.

Maybe he would fucking want to join just to show that there ARE people in the military that don't beat on prisoners?

Maybe, but that doesn't change the fact that people in the military did beat up prisoners. If he joins the army without denouncing those actions, how are we to know that he doesn't intend to perpetuate them?

Someone that honestly loves his country so much he is willing to put his life on the line is stupid?

If he is doing so blindly then yes, whether or not the thing he does thereby is wrong or not. Of course, that is only my (and I reckon most of the educated world, except some parts of the United States and some other really religious educated regions) ethical standpoint, and you may stand elsewhere on this issue.

O RLY? Care to actually back asinine claims like that up with actual fucking data?

Well, I haven't heard of any prisoners being tortured or beaten during the invasion per se, nor in the immediate aftermath, and my educated guess would be that the advent of such actions would indeed be sudden, but following a gradual increase in emotional detachment from the guards (refer to the Stanford prison experiment that I quoted two sentences later, which is more data than you'll ever need on this matter, I'd think). But what I wrote was not a scientific article. If I were to cite every paper I've ever read (most of which you probably couldn't understand right away anyway) to satisfy your misplaced need for "data", I would not be finished writing that first post yet. Relishing that thought may well please you; if so you are misguided indeed (misguided about how "science" works and also about the internets).

Again, O RLY? Moar data plz. Or should I say ANY data, please.
Again, have you not read what you had just quoted, where I referred you to a well known psychological experiment made in a prestigious school, published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and repeated in countless psychology textbooks which happens to sustain my very point? Or are you just trying to rip off my leg off of my still warm body? Also, see my last answer about your misunderstanding of the process of science, which applies here especially to social sciences.

Maybe because the point of my fucking post wasn't to counter his points. "Troops are low life scum" isn't a point, it's a n opinion, in case that's what you were referring to.

Maybe so, but then so was my remark not a statement about the opinionatedness of the poster you replied to, but about your implicit attempt at refutation through a more or less carefully/consciously constructed exclamation of disbelief. Indeed, as it is difficult to ascertain scientifically that a certain person or type of person is "lowlife scum", such bold statements are to be classified as opinion. It doesn't change the fact though, that some opinions are more educated than others and thus may carry more weight, either subjectively through a shared worldview and knowledge base, or objectively by being shown to be closer to an established truth that the participants in this debate eventually come to recognize as such later.

What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING said here?

Yes indeed it doesn't directly relate, sorry. It is part of a previous version of my post that I forgot to erase entirely. Though the point it makes is now moot since it is not attached to the post as a whole anymore, the segment can be reconstructed as such: "[Your experience in your squadron may give you a different picture of the lowlifedness of the enlisted troops as a whole, since you generalize from your own, subjectively positive experience, but things may not be such when viewed from outside, and your own squadron may be a statistical anomaly.] Yes, you may have "heard [good] things" [about the rest of the army as whole], but there's a reason hearsay is not allowed as evidence in a trial: it's actually pretty unreliable. Also, keep and bear in mind that no one likes to think that he himself did "bad things" in a conflict. They always blame the other or perversely blame only themselves." For that last bit, see the concept of "pluralistic ignorance" that I quoted earlier.

Have I thrown a stone here?

I would say yes, and my whole post was, in a sense, a way to make this very point.

Basically, next time, if you don't have any data to back up supposed "facts", STFU.

Unfortunately for you, I had data, as I think I have shown here (too) extensively. But it was not to back any facts but to back opinion. I never claimed to have any facts concerning the lowlifedness of enlisted troops and neither did the original poster. The fact that I asserted my opinion as if it were fact is a rhetorical device of which you should be well aware of in "FOX-News America". It is one of the most simple, pervasive, transparent and perversely effective device in the whole of human speech (again, in my and some other people's view). It is also one of the easiest to catch, at least when you and your opponents are on different wavelengths: hence to need to train yourself to detect it even when people you agree with use it. I guarantee you it will save you from trouble in the long run.

"better to rest in peace in the warm body of a friend than in the cold ground"... and I totally dig the music too, great find!