Teachers make less than transit police

.. and yet we ask them to ground truth in historical fact, to provide context, read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up claims with evidence from original documents. We ask them to do this without making mistakes or be fired. We ask them to teach our kids how to self-govern, without offending the delicate sensibilities of their highly polarized, FoxNews-only, narcissistic parents. Is education just for teaching kids what the parents want taught, or raising responsible citizens?

Transit police? They write parking tickets. My dog could do what they do. Both occupations are publicly-funded, but we value paying higher salaries to people who write our own parking tickets (to fund their salaries) than we value public education. Gross.

The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently predicted that the novels of the next 10 to 15 years “will be awful … Art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that’s uncomfortable,” she said. “Literature is the last thing that we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are.” The connection between reading and democratic citizenship might not be direct, but it’s real.

The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted. The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps. American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.

@wildgrass

Teachers in Canada get 80k a year!

Way too much.

That's 60k a year American.

@wildgrass said
.. and yet we ask them to ground truth in historical fact, to provide context, read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up claims with evidence from original documents. We ask them to do this without making mistakes or be fired. We ask them to teach our kids how to self-govern, without offending the delicate sensibilities of their hig ...[text shortened]... uote]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/pandemic-politics-public-schools/622824/

@wildgrass

Parents are pulling students out of public schools and putting them into private schools because they are tired of the anti white rhetoric...the gender identity bullshyt...and the lack of accountability when a student is a failure.

Other countries focus on math, science and performance...etc etc.

Yall Americans gave up on that long ago.

@contenchess said
@wildgrass

Teachers in Canada get 80k a year!

Way too much.

That's 60k a year American.

@athousandyoung said
You expect too little for your time if you think that’s too much for a middle class professional working full time.

@contenchess said
Labour is hard.

Sitting at a desk and telling students to do their school work is not.

@wildgrass said
.. and yet we ask them to ground truth in historical fact, to provide context, read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up claims with evidence from original documents. We ask them to do this without making mistakes or be fired. We ask them to teach our kids how to self-govern, without offending the delicate sensibilities of their hig ...[text shortened]... uote]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/pandemic-politics-public-schools/622824/

@AThousandYoung

I said Teachers are over paid prima donnas who basically just sit there while American students fail and you start talking about some slaves from 200 years ago?

If you're going to hang onto tyrones nuts please do it in private and don't share it here 🙄

@contenchess said
@AThousandYoung

I said Teachers are over paid prima donnas who basically just sit there while American students fail and you start talking about some slaves from 200 years ago?

If you're going to hang onto tyrones nuts please do it in private and don't share it here 🙄

@athousandyoung said
What are “transit police”?

Parking tickets where I live are generally written by Parking Enforcement workers. Police have guns and are expected to be ready to kill or die at a moments notice. So…IDK

@wildgrass said
Where you live, is that (police with guns) job statistically more dangerous than other jobs?

Where I live, it's 1,000x more deadly to be a logger than a police officer, statistically speaking.

@contenchess said
@AThousandYoung

I said Teachers are over paid prima donnas who basically just sit there while American students fail and you start talking about some slaves from 200 years ago?

If you're going to hang onto tyrones nuts please do it in private and don't share it here 🙄

@athousandyoung said
Sounds like loggers should get paid a lot.

I have no idea how often cops get killed in inner city LA but I know it does happen.

@athousandyoung said
There is a wide variance in teacher salary from $40k to six figures in the private schools. But yes the public school teachers are underpaid, under supplied and overworked.

You might want to critically evaluate what you think “we” ask of teachers because people expect widely varying things from child care to the three Rs, to the sort of thing you refer to, to propaganda, to neutrality, etc etc