If it's September, it must be time to bash teachers. This week's bashing is brought to you by Fark, where various people commented about an article on stressed out teachers looking for a relief. Can't say I blame the teachers. I'd hate to have to deal with politics, standardized testing, parents who think their child is over entitled etc. Aside from the vacation, there is no way I'd want to be a teacher.
My mother was a NYC teacher in a working class neighborhood through the 1970s - early 90s. Though the school wasn't that great, it wasn't horrible either. That changed by the late 80s, NYC was in recession and all the kids who were in private school were crammed into her over crowded school and quickly consumed by the wolves (those who came to learn got their butts kicked).
She was old school and that didn't play well by 1990 when parents of children who refused to behave got mad at the teachers because their children were screwing up. One parent was upset that my mother couldn't do more to control her child in school. At that point, the child had been sent to the dean, been sent to detention, had a parent called etc (corporal punishment was illegal). Calling the parent was the final step -- it was supposed to be the part where the parent actually parented and tried to get their child back on the right path. For various reasons, that didn't happen in that neighborhood. If a teacher had told my parents I was misbehaving like some of her students were, I would have been killed, literally. Not so in her school, there the parents blamed the teachers.
All around she saw fail. Junior high kids getting pregnant, and happy about it. Parents who seemed ok that their lack of involvement was dooming their children to careers at McDonalds because they wouldn't sit their kids down and demand that they behave in school. Out of date books. Classes meeting in bathrooms due to lack of space. Pretty sad when you think about it. The school was so bad that a book was written about it.
By the end, the stress was so great, she was on tons of meds. One day, she just mailed in her keys and quit. She wasn't that far from a full retirement but she didn't care. She was able to retire on disability (her health had been declining the previous few years which didn't help in a school where the strong preyed on the weak) & was off her meds in about a month.
Somehow or another children did graduate from that school and have successful lives (I've worked with a few over the years who remembered my mother). They were the ones who had parents that worked with the school. Unfortunately they were the minority.
Granted, this was almost 2 decades ago, but I imagine that the same situation exists today. The son of a friend recently started teaching in an inner city school and is already ready to quit. It's not so much the kid who got expelled for selling drugs in school still showing up everyday to visit his clients before and after school, it's the children too tired to stay awake in class after working two shifts the night before or skipping school to work that morning, dooming their futures. I couldn't go to work and see that amount of fail every day for all the tea in China.
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