Everyone wants to blame the teachers. No me. I think they deserve a medal for what they are able to accomplish.
Teachers are the most underappreciated people in America today. They are put in terrible situations and given no authority to correct them and are expected to educate our children despite it all.
The No Child Left Behind laws, although good intentioned, have done nothing but make teachers jobs even harder. It forces them to spend the majority of the school year teaching classes how to take standardized tests.
The standardized tests are what make or break a school systems budget for the year. If they under achieve their federal funding gets cut. So you can be sure that school administrations are pushing teachers to make sure that their students do well on those tests. Their jobs depend on it and they know it.
And the violence in school is so out of hand that some schools have taken to putting metal detectors at their doors and hiring off duty police officers to patrol their halls.
Teachers can not even feel safe in their own class rooms. They never know which kid might have had a bad night at home and is ready to snap.
The school administrations are no help. Teachers could send a child to the principle’s office but it doesn’t do them any good any more. They spend 5 minutes talking to them and send them right back. No detentions or suspensions any more just a “don’t do it again’. We all know how well that works.
Administrations are more worried about covering their collective behinds than they are about making sure that teachers can teach.
It seems as if the only way to get punished in school these days it to bring a set of nail clippers to school in your purse. With Zero Tolerance they are considered a lethal weapon and having them at school will get you kicked out for the rest of the year.
The biggest problem teachers have is parents. Most parents are under the mistaken impression that their children can do no wrong. If their children have a problem in school it has to be the teachers fault. It doesn’t matter that the children haven’t brought in a stitch of homework the entire year or passed even a single test, the teacher is wrong and just doesn’t like them.
Teachers are expected to be educators, psychologists, social workers, and cops. All with no help from anyone.
In my book they deserve hazard duty pay for what they do and the things they have to put up with to do it.
