Teachers in the Corner (Updated) 5
In the Guardian, Michael Paarlberg wonders why teachers and their profession have become objects of scorn, certainly in the eyes of wingnuts.
No, none of the above. It’s teachers and their pesky insistence that they know how best to educate kids simply because they spend most of the day with them.
I think there is another factor at work, the desire of some persons to force teachers to teach fiction. For example.
Read the rest. Then check out Will Bunch’s take.
Addendum, While Cooking Supper:
Freddie deBoer at Balloon Juice:
Follow the link. Now.
Also, what the hell is a Honey Boo Boo?
On second thought, I don’t want to know.
September 11, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Hating on teachers was always popular in the sticks when I was growing up. In Pine Grove, the reactionary stupid in the not-teachers demographic thought the teachers were “richies” because of the three months of summer and because a lot of them moved into what would be the most modern development in the town, within walking distance of the high school and what would become the complex including the middle school. The Republican Party has simply taken this animosity by the heevahava element and turned it into a national strategy congruent with its universal tactic of scapegoating various segments in the lower and middle class. But now even the most misinformed have become uneasy with the constant crapping on and demonization of others who are often their neighbors or people they see face to face at school events. There’s also a race element to it. Where are the poorest performing schools. In the urban poor places and you can cynically go after the union without immediately being called out as someone who’s really complaining about what they think are there taxes going to educate the not-white moochers, layabouts and — probably, some illegals, too.
September 11, 2012 at 3:29 pm
And as for the Rahm Emanuel, Clinton/Obama adviser thing, I would describe Ryan telling him to keep on as smallpox endorsing flesh-eating bacteria. Emanuel also impressed me as a loathsome character, one who was able to parlay being loathsome into an image of no-nonsense toughness, someone Clinton hired, among many, to pull things to the right in triangulation sessions, someone who could be relied upon to ‘punch a hippie,’ and in the Obama administration to curse people as ‘retards’ who wanted single payer. So what did he ever do that was notable, other than being nasty. In Chicago, he’s backed “decriminalization’ for small amounts of marijuana. What a social innovator and stalwart of progressive value. Service under Bill Clinton set up a cottage industry Attila-the-Hun style Dems like him, perhaps a good thing if you were one running in a red state and had to figure out how to convince people who didn’t believe in evolution you weren’t a commie sissy.
September 12, 2012 at 10:37 am
Reality tv show star, I think. Anyway, I like how the column points out that newspaper pundits, at the big papers which make all the noise, make a lot more than teachers, which is entirely true. Or what I call the shoeshiners because, to keep their worth, they have to — almost always — take the position of the upper 1 percent, or the extremist, as reasonable. Plus, the majority of their careers depend on it.
September 12, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Whew! After that, I need a cigarette.
September 12, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Also, teachers weren’t hated where I grew up. I still doubt that they are, but I can tell you this:
My mother went back to teaching when I was in high school (first because she was asked to–the algebra teacher quit for some reason and the principal, who was in my parents’ bridge club, knew she had been a math teacher, then she stayed on for 20 more years). She said that the biggest change she noticed in that period was this:
When she first went back, if little Johnny got into trouble at school, the parents’ reaction would be, “What did the little s. o. b. do, Mrs. Teacher?”
By the time she retired, that had morphed to “What did you bastards do to my little darling?”