A new survey shows a coming mass exodus from the teaching profession, mostly over frustration with COVID-stalled students who have fallen so far behind despite remote-learning efforts. What can be done to fix American public education in the wake of the pandemic?
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17 replies on “Bad Teacher: Coming Mass Exodus from Profession as COVID-Stalled Students Frustrate Veterans”
Certainly, an interesting issue our education system is about to face, on top of all the other desperate issues that it is already facing. But I think the issue really is that the question needs to be peeled back one layer further to reveal who it is exactly that is teaching these new teachers and administering their administrators, for there the root of the problems will be uncovered!?!?
“That’s what they, they start when you’re young, y’know. When you’re little they, at school they, they Baden-Powell all the boys and they Betty Crocker all the girls and they, then they air condition ya’ and put ya’ in the Easy Bake Oven and ya’ can’t breathe any more.” – Jerry Fletcher, Conspiracy Theory
Personally I think kids should be taught according to the Trivium and the Quadrivium.
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The Trivium: Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.
Grammar: The mechanics of language. This is the step where the student “comes to terms,” defining the objects and information perceived by the five senses. Hence, the Law of Identity: a tree is a tree, and not a cat.
Logic: The “mechanics” of thought and of analysis, the process of composing sound arguments and identifying fallacious arguments and statements and so systematically removing contradictions, thereby producing factual knowledge that can be trusted.
Rhetoric: The application of language in order to instruct and to persuade the listener and the reader. It is the knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) and being transmitted outwards (rhetoric).
In short, you begin by teaching someone how to think, how to construct a sound argument and how to identify an unsound one, and how to communicate those arguments.
Once the Trivium is mastered, the Quadrivium.
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The Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.
Arithmetic: Numbers in the abstract.
Geometry: Numbers in space.
Music: Numbers in time.
Astronomy: Numbers in space and time.
With those as a foundation, a person can learn anything they please, as long as they have what Bill refers to as the necessary “horsepower.”
Just imagine how hard the leftist indoctrinators would fight against that.
I heartily concur with your program. This should be taught to every child at/by the age of 10. Then I would add to it by changing the existing mandatory schooling system’s teaching method with optionally chosen academy system. Look at the system used prior to the age/grade/regimented system used today. History shows it was more successful at raising America’s literacy rate to the highest in the world. Take that, Horace Mann!
There are tons of examples throughout human history of the “cure” being worse than the “disease”. Many years “physicians” used bleeding to help different illnesses. (This was popularized because of the inbreeding of the European royalty causing a rare disease where they over-produced red blood cells. Bleeding helped, so why not do this for everybody!?) Aztecs beheading conquered tribes – so that the sun could be guaranteed to come up tomorrow – comes to mind as an extension of this principle.
Other pressures are in place to eject seasoned teachers from the profession, making way for the nut jobs. 1) Teachers are pushed to get their masters degrees (to funnel more money into the educational-indoctrinational complex) which gets them higher up on the pay scale. BUT, if the teacher has to leave for any reason (e.g. spousal transfer forces a move to a new area or taking a few years out to have & raise kids), she is unemployable due to being more expensive than the younger nut job. 2) Another is the void of discipline. When the teacher sends a thug, er, ah, “student,” to the office for throwing a desk across the room at another student and the thug is returned to the classroom in 5 minutes with no repercussions, you create thousands of mini-Portlands all across the country. And 3) Holding the teacher accountable for what should have been done at home turns the teacher into a punching bag. When I was in school, if my grades were below par, I had TWO PARENTS and the teacher who held ME accountable for my study habits. Nowadays, we have “parents” who blame the teacher for their child’s irresolute study habits. THEIR little darling couldn’t POSSIBLY be at fault, and CERTAINLY the faux parent can’t be held accountable for ensuring that their little darling gets homework done before the phone and the video game and the TV get turned on.
Mrs Ron was an teacher for 32 years, almost all K-2, except for 1 awful year with emotionally disturbed 13 year old. (yes, all 13 year olds are emotionally disturbed to one level or another. It’s the hormones. These were a different level, the kind cats and dogs feared). She retired right before the ELE that became known as Covid-19 struck.
She was the first person I heard say that masks on kids were the worst idea since it would a) stunt their growth from an interpersonal standpoint and b) inhibit language skills as they need to see the way words are formed.
She was correct on both counts.
And these are referred to as developmental years for a reason. Maybe it just delays development, or maybe it is stunted. The former is bad. The latter is tragic.
I would say the law of unintended consequences, but I am not convinced this was unintended.
I am convinced that such subjugation is always intended by at least one entity — human or otherwise. Those who would subjugate humanity are prone to such efforts to both unlearn and indoctrinate the populous — especially the youth.
The expression “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” does have its limitations. It’s hard to say where the line between malice and stupidity was crossed with this situation. Crossed it most certainly was nonetheless.
The Democrat Left saw the COVID thing as a road to power and a weapon to unseat the most threatening President (to them) in modern times. There absolutely was malice involved there.
What I’m unsure of, and still unconvinced of, is where that line was crossed and became profound stupidity. Is it that in their malice and avaristic thirst for power the Democrat Left didn’t care that they were damaging as Bill says, “a cohort of Americans who will be stunted throughout their whole lives”? Or was the creation of such a cohort actually intentional?
Did some Democrat master spider sit in his web somewhere and pull strings to cause that, to create a lesser caste of the disaffected and malcontent? Or is it just the callous disregard of the Left for collateral damage inflicted as they strove to inflate and exploit the situation in order to retain political relevance?
Because under Trump, they were definitely on their way out. Riots, lawlessness, destruction and Democrat indifference or often even support for the insanity preceding COVID had taken a heavy toll on their voting base.
Along comes COVID and the Democrats seeing a political opportunity seize a perfectly good crisis so as not to let it go to waste. Trump could have headed that off but he would have had to act very early, immediately after the “2 weeks to flatten the curve” expired. He failed to act and to be fair it would have been a very tough call that the Left would have exploited either way.
So I can’t help but wonder how much of the subsequent damage to our Nation is the result of intentional malice and how much is just the result of abject stupidity. The thing I do not wonder about in the least is who is at fault be it malice or stupidity. That blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the Democrat political machine.
That they have demonstrated time and again that they care not for collateral damage; whether that be children in the womb or seals and Marines on rooftops and deserts cannot be argued.
In this case, I heard many voices stating that masking of kids was wrong, for many reasons. Not the least of which lack of general risk to that segment of the population. So, by ignoring other arguments for the search for ever more power, is it callous disregard or blatantly malicious?
Their kids and grandkids in private schools were largely unaffected. Just the plebes. Does that reinforce “callous disregard”? (I think I like that phrase a lot and may have seen them open for Mott the Hoople) At what point does it cross from we know something bad may happen, we don’t care into we know this specific bad thing is likely to happen to this specific group and we think that outcome is fine.
The latter speaks to intent to me. If I take an action knowing that specific outcome is likely, even if not the only outcome, then I intend that outcome to happen.
Splitting hairs, I know, but this is the internet – what else are you going to do? Have a reasonable discourse?? 😉
Lol, good points all and double LOL @ the Mott the Hoople opening band.
There’s no point where, whether by callous disregard (as you like that phrase so much, it would be inhumane of me to deprive you of it) or outright malicious intent where the disregarders or the intenders are not responsible for the results.
You know how LBJ said regarding his sudden fit of “altruistic” support for human rights and racial equality previously trodden to dust by his own party … “We’ll have those (n-word redacted) voting Democrat for the next 250 years!”?
This slug of disaffected cohort chugging down our socio-political pipeline undid that and we would be remiss not to hold Democrat’s feet to the fire for it.
Sometimes victims really are victims. It would be good to never let those people forget who victimized them, and it wasn’t the Conservative Right.
Can we get Mrs. Ron to talk about Randi Weingarten and teacher’s unions? I feel I know where it may go, but my gut tells me to ask someone with actual experience. Mrs Ron just may be that someone.
One of the good things about living in SW VA is that we live in an area where you do not have to join a union to be a teacher. Mrs Ron has 0 love lost for teacher’s unions.
They exist, in her mind, bolstered by 3 decades of seeing them in action, to do nothing other than foster an adversarial relationship between teachers and parents.
The question needs to be asked of teachers: who is you client? This service that you provide, to whom does it benefit. If not the students and their parents, then who?
Teachers’ Unions benefit – ? Certainly not the students, they pushed for more absentee and remote classes. The parents? the unions don’t think the parents should be informed of activities surrounding their minor children. Do they push for better learning among kids? to be held accountable for results?
You are quite correct – Mrs Ron has a poor opinion of and union heads in general, and Ms Weingarten in specific. And that opinion was fostered long before finding out how much teacher union heads are paid.
Thanks Mrs. S! And thanks to you Mr. Ron
Mrs. Ron should check out Freedom Project Academy. That is if she is looking for new teaching employment.
It turns out that sitting your kid in front of a full day of (groomers involved in) television programming isn’t as effective as educating them in reading, writing, and mathematics. And then there is the not-so-hidden messaging.
The interesting thing about education is that Finland, with their high-scoring students, don’t even begin school until age seven. Of course their parents are probably different than ours in their degree of involvement.
Amen. As awful as the learning loss was, our local school system cost our kids two years of their lives. Year one was in garbage virtual, while year two was wearing the thong of shame on their faces. History will not be kind to us all for letting this happen