Magic trick costs teacher job

Like I said "BABYSITTERS"!
Tell a kid to behave and they beat you up!
*happens everyday in todays Public(and Pvt) Schools!
There is NO dicipline anymore,just a bunch of out-of-control Hooligans running the classrooms as they see fit.

<So, he has to pass the benchmark reading test at his grade level. Why? because your school has too many children with low IQs, so we are temporarly changing this student's IQ to 100 to be within NCLB guidelines.) The amount of paperwork is tremendous. Since I started 16 years ago, 10 days have been added to my contract year with no additional pay. The real "magic trick" is that any teachers stick around all. It must be all the respect and gratitude we get that keeps us going.>

Jill,

I have been silently stewing over this thread for the last several days, and I just want to say that I am very sympathetic to your plight. It has been over 30 years since I stepped into a classroom, but even then I was seeing the shape of things to come. You are fighting a lone battle in the war on entropy. The neocons discovered the dangers of an educated public after their boy Nixon was deposed. Ever since then the American school system has been the victim of vicious PR and deliberate underfunding. The entire purpose of which is to reduce education to what it is now; useless. Believe it or not, I actually met a student from the Richmond school district (famous for having a movie about their basketball coach done recently) who had no idea what WW II was about. He had a vague idea that it involved a dude named Hitler. The forces of fascism have won. A generation has been raised who do not have the intellectual tools to stand up for themselves.

This is not your fault. This is the fault of the neocons who deliberately dismantled the American education system during the 80s. The first thing that the Reagan Administration did was to kill loans for actual colleges and increase them for diploma mills. During the Clinton 90s education was systematically under funded while our tax dollars went to "vouchers" that increased the profits of the ritzi private schools. Now today our schools don't have the budget to do their jobs, Bush has diverted millions in the education budget to private companies that do these standardized tests without giving you the budget to get your kids ready for them.

Then when things inevitably fail, you get the blame rather than the people who actually deserve the blame; the taxpayers for falling for the neocon bullshit. You are the victim of self-fulfilling prophecy and I respect you for continuing to do an impossible job.

I apologize, Jill, if I came across as not knowing what I'm talking about. I graduated from high school in 2002, so my experiences are a little more recent that Jake's are.

I've lived in Southeast Florida all my life. Apparently, at some point during my middle school years, somebody wrongly assumed that because I wasn't fitting in with the herd mentality and wasn't too good in math that I must have a learning disability. As a result, I got stuck in with classes with kids who were too good for juvenile hall but too bad for "regular" classes. Don't get me wrong, there were a handful of teachers I had classes with that I liked and seemed to like teaching but most of them seemed almost...beaten down.

I don't know where you're teaching from, but where I live there is something called the Florida Comprehensive Academic Test (FCAT). It's a test that all seventh and eleventh graders are forced to take. And not because it means anything, either. It's to determine what schools get the grant money. Anything below an "B" means no money. So they force these poor children to cram years in advance, and all for a piece of the pie.

If anything, I'm suprized you have lasted as long as you have.

-psyche

<<It is NOT as universally accepted as one might think. >>

For sure.. (and I just happened to come across a pic before which I put in the album for Peter to admire.. :)