At least someone respects the work that teachers do

"This has been a horrible decade for teachers. I can’t imagine how demoralized you must feel. But I came here today to deliver an important message to you: As I get older, I appreciate more and more the teachers that I had growing up. And I’m not alone. There are millions of people just like me.

So the next time you’re feeling down, or exhausted, or unappreciated, or at the end of your rope; the next time you turn on the TV and see yourself called “overpaid;” the next time you encounter some simple-minded, punitive policy that’s been driven into your life by some corporate reformer who has literally never taught anyone anything. … Please know that there are millions of us behind you. You have an army of regular people standing right behind you, and our appreciation for what you do is so deeply felt. We love you, we thank you and we will always have your back.” -- Matt Damon




Frankly, the first paragraph is right. It's been a terrible decade for the profession of teaching; it's been a great decade for those companies that skim so much money out of educational funding to create standardized testing and measurement tools for those tests though. It's also been a great decade for politicians who want to score cheap political points off the backs of people who have dedicated their lives to the next generation.

 

There are great teachers who truly want to educate children.

There are lazy teachers who decided to find a job for a useless degree.

There are greedy teachers who insist on more and more benefits regardless of the consequences.

We need to support the first kind as much as we can and to recruit more of them. We need to get rid of as many of the rest as we can.

 

The Tea Party is sick in the head. The first people they attacked were teachers. It is mind boggling.

 

I don't understand your second point. Please elaborate.

 

I'm just talking about the people with history or literature degrees who tried to enter the job market, discovered that there was little or no market for their degrees, so they went into teaching.

A prime example was my 8th grade Algebra teacher. She had a degree in history and no clue about algebra. Several times what she taught was the opposite of how algebra works and was just wrong. She couldn't figure out why her answer didn't match the book. That is not someone who should be teaching.

 

Ah, that doesn't happen in my state. You have to have extensive pedagogical coursework to teach K-12 here. I encountered, at the post-secondary level, professors who were very knowledge in their subject area but had no idea how to actually teach it. They were more absorbed with their research than their teaching responsibilities, which seems like such a waste. I understand your sentiment, but haven't seen much of it in my teaching experience. Frankly, I don't feel qualified to say whether she should teach or not; however, it's pretty clear that she needed some pedagogical scaffolding at the very least though.

 

You sure Matt Damon is the person we all should be taking advice from?

 

Would you care to refute the message, instead of attacking the messenger? Or do you really have nothing to say about it?

 

Which message? Your message or Matt Damon's? Personally I have no interests in refuting his delusions.

If you want to make education better, get rid of the Board of Education.

 

I know requirements vary greatly from state to state, some require a specific degree, others just require a certificate. It all depends.

Regardless, I did have some great teachers, ones who were able and willing to teach way beyond the material in the book. Those teachers should be rewarded and respected. Teachers who barely do the minimum should be encouraged to improve or eliminated if they don't.

 

What delusions, explicitly, are you talking about in the original post?

 

I'm talking about Matt Damon.

 

Fair enough. Ohio's teaching standards are generally pretty stringent, but there are some people who are either lazy or disillusioned who need to find motivation or another profession. I won't disagree with that. I will disagree with a categorization of the profession as "lazy or greedy" as a whole.

 

Please start another thread then, entitled "Why Matt Damon is delusional." You clearly can't find those delusions in the quote I posted, which means you don't have much to contribute.

 

Maybe she was good in history it is fault of the school.

 

What is there to contribute? You offer nothing to the discussion to start with except blame game dribble.

 

I believe the word you're looking for is "drivel."

Please go away. You can't be constructive and you can't contribute to the discourse.

 

As someone who just recently got out of highschool and who's very interested in education that there are dozens of teachers that I had who I owe very little to and who were mediocre/just plain bad teachers. There are a handful who were absolutely wonderful educators who not only promoted education they promoted LEARNING and I would do anything to be like these teachers. Most of them were nothing special or they seriously hurt my quality of education and destroyed the learning capabilities of my classmates.
Education is the most important thing in the world in my mind, and most American teachers are a disgrace to what should be expected from their profession.

 

Do you really feel qualified to make such a statement?

 

No the word is correct.

And I already contributed to the discourse. You're just bad at paying attention. Refer to wopper stompers post and you'll catch up, finally.

 

People blame teachers only because they are part of the Government. It's amazing how no one blames the absolutely ignorant parents that are raising these children to be pure tyrants. The education system is strongly correlated to socioeconomics. Teachers have very little control in poor communities over their students outside influence. Students and parents have to bare some responsibility for being idiots, not just teachers.

I have a feeling most people against education simply are uneducated. The current conservative movement is people that believe that education "brainwashes" individuals in to becoming liberal.

Lol, maybe people become liberal because they are educated.

 

So you don't want ANY local boards of education? You want it all run by state/federal governments? I thought you were a Tea Partier?

 

Must be the good ol days when teachers were allowed to spank their children. Or maybe that was just catholic school.

 

I appreciate the good ones...the very few good ones. That said, until we pay for competence, the issue is moot.