I'm reminded of my middle-school chess club. Our faculty sponsor had just learned how to play. Everybody in the club could beat him. He had so little interest in chess, I could only suppose he sponsored the club because that was the way teachers got ahead in their careers, by doing extracurricular crap, and chess sounded easy and air-conditioned as opposed to strenuous basketball, etc. The extent of his involvement with our chess club was posing for the yearbook photo.
I read in TIME magazine the other day that in Norway teachers are respected professionals like doctors and lawyers. They are not crapped on by politicians as they are here in the U.S., where the rich want the poor to be ignorant slave labor like it was in the good old days, before the War of Northern Aggression. In Norway, teachers are required to have Master's degrees. That means they have something going on upstairs. In my schools, there was some dead wood along with the good teachers. I mean, there was good and bad. It was a mixed salad. Some people went into teaching because it was their true calling, while others did it because they couldn't do anything else.
I think teachers should earn a minimum of $50K per year in today's economy (and no, that's not too much money) with excellent medical and dental benefits, and their jobs should not be guaranteed (I don't believe in tenure). I think Master's degrees are a good idea actually. Anyone who teaches should be pretty damn comfortable with academia. I remember one of my teachers told us he scored a 1000 on the S.A.T. That was on the same day that he told the class we were all a bunch of losers destined to dig ditches. Yep, I've had some crappy teachers in my day, but you know what, the system is rotten because the system put them in the classroom.
Spend more money on education and less on bombing faraway countries, and the country might become more intellectual and capable of understanding and thriving in this complicated world. People have been saying this for decades--all my life--but most people continue voting conservative, Republican, anti-progress, anti-hope and every which way to ensure that the U.S. will continue its long and steady decline.
No comments:
Post a Comment