Bozo said:
I agree with jtr1962.
Back when I started school, teachers wanted to teach. Now, they want outrageous pay for doing nothing and a extra fat pension for when they start doing even less.
If you would like to see teachers that want to teach and care about their students, look at the Catholic school system. 200% better teachers at one third the cost.
That is in my opinion a very twisted view of reality.
Public schoolteachers aren't just teachers any more. They also have to be babysitters. They are sometimes put in the position of having to teach manners and behavioral lessons that should've been learned at home or in a pre-school. They have no strong means of effective discipline, and they have a certain orthodoxy forced on them by administrators and parents. On top of that, they have to put up with the restrictions and requirements of getting their kids through bullshit standardized testing (that 10-year-old better know the difference between simile and metaphor!), leaving less time for other potentially valuable lessons (PE, Health, Music, Art).
So, about this teaching manners an behaviors? My aunt just retired from a 30-year career teaching Phys. Ed. to grade-schoolers in Westville, Illinois - one of the poorest communities in that state. 75% of her kids, for the last 10 years, have had developmental disabilities or complications from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or, yes, Crack or meth-addicted mothers. She had five-year olds trying to smoke or chew tobacco during PE, and at one point literally interrupted a RAPE between a six year old and a five year old (the boy knew exactly what to do. Exactly). Those are extremes of behavior, but given class sizes of over 25 and no teacher's aides, those kinds of breakdowns really do happen.
Or I can look to an experience *I* had over the summer of 2005. My training company participated in a program to teach the children of lower-class parents computer skills. I mentioned some of my experiences at the time. These children were older - mostly 14 or 15, but the things I had to deal with were outrageous: Several of the boys committed acts that would be considered sexual assault if they had happened between adults. I had to break up fights. I had a kid come to class so drunk he pissed himself. My class size was *12* (I saw 48 kids in total, for maybe 48 hours total), and there was absolutely nothing I could do to the troublemakers... not all that different from the power of a public school teacher. I had to deal with the kids' bullshit, and at the same time I had to do my best to teach a normal class and hopefully impart some kind of knowledge on the students in that environment.
At the end of that program, there were kids I would've happily murdered with my bare hands, then danced on their entrails.
So, OK, this is what I see: I see a Public school teacher who is basically stuck in a room with the worst of humanity (Oh no! Not my little Johnny! He's a good boy... except when he's grabbing little Mary's tits and punching Robby for wearing the wrong jeans) for six hours a day. He can't hit them. He can't swear at them.
Maybe he can yell at them. He can
send them to the principal's office - ooooh, but when he does that, he'll probably get screamed at by said principal and, later on, the parents of that sweet little angel.
For that stress and aggravation, the poor bastard who got an Ed degree gets a couple months off in the summer and a salary that's somewhere between what a McDonald's manager earns (one of my co-workers taught grade school for two years with an annual salary of $16,800) and, if they're really lucky, an ending salary that's close to what I was making, two years out of college with my CS degree. That teacher gets six hours in a classroom, probably another couple hours dealing with whatever extra-curricular he's been railroaded into sponsoring or supervising, and then at least a couple hours grading papers or doing lesson plans when he gets home (it takes me between 2 and four hours to prepare materials for one two and a half hour class if I've never taught it. Probably similar for them)
Given what Public School teachers put up with and what we expect of them, I'm all for giving them whatever they want. Pensions, raises, sex slaves. Whatever.
Besides, I'd say a boy in a Catholic school is running a much higher risk for teh involuntary buttsecks by a priest who might actually not rape little boys if he could just get laid like a normal guy every once in a while.
