Comments on: What Makes Teddy Run – Follow the Money….

By: drslammy

drslammy — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 02:52:25 +0000

Antonio,

I’d love to at least occasionally hear how wrong I am. I mean, you crank up a campaign like this and you make a lot of noise about how bad things are and, well, there are feckin’ jillions of teachers in the country. I keep waiting to hear from a couple of them telling me how out of touch I am with reality.

But it doesn’t happen, does it? Everybody I hear from has a story to tell that, if anything, makes me wonder how badly I’m UNDERstating the problem.

Thanks for commenting.

By: antonio

antonio — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:45:19 +0000

I was a High School teacher for 23 years. Professional idiots would sweep through the school, several a month, charging high speaker’s fees, and talk utter nonsense. They would brook no disagreement-they had the Masters’. Tons of ghastly food (fat and sugar and starch)would sweep through the cafeteria periodically, at a great expense to the taxpayer. Millions of computers nationwide would adorn classroom after classroom, raking up super profits. Tons of useless books with pretty pictures and little information would make the publishers go from millionaires to billionaires, with a guaranteed captive audience. Candies and cookies of the Girl Scout type, Coke machine soft drinks, varsity sweaters, etc.,on sale daily in an endless parade of items which would even be advertised in the hallways. Teachers would be required (yes, required) to take Seminars disguised as professional advancement, paying for them themselves, ranging from 300 to 800 dollars, sometimes involving flight, hotel and restaurant as additional expenses. Teachers from the first day started scheming how to get into administration where the big bucks were. Everybody looked down on the teachers as “losers” while paying lip service to the “wonderful job they were doing”. Every few months the programs we were implementing would be scrapped as a new team of highly paid “experts” made us implement new methods, when in reality we just went ahead and taught as we had always done. (plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose). Ah, but the experts made money. There were weekly mind-numbing meetings whose only purpose was to let the students out early. Schools in America are a business-they dont need to privatize- and students are efficiently trained to be consumers. On the rare occasion a young American goes abroad once he/she leaves the Hilton he/she has no idea where he/she is or what he/she is looking at. The natives wonder who this ignorant, silly person is.You get what you pay for, I guess.

By: drslammy

drslammy — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:24:32 +0000

As I tried to teach my students, “money” isn’t always the answer to a question about why people behave they way they do, but it’s a damned good first question to ask.

Your point about “rich guy first” is important. We have been encouraged to see America as a vast red/blue, left/right, retro/metro, coast/flyover divide where people who are almost exactly alike in every meaningful way are somehow mortally opposed. An old-guard elite who was born with a silver spoon up his ass is somehow more like Joe Average than than he is another old-guard elite born with a silver spoon up his ass.

It’s a marvel of propaganda, really – and perhaps the greatest swindle in the history of the world. It’s true that there is a great divide in America, but it isn’t left vs. right, it’s over vs. under.

Let me remind people one more time that our presidential election pitted two stupendously rich and connected brothers from the most elite university social fraternity in America against each other. Brother George and Brother John were a year apart in Skull & Bones, I think, although I’m not sure off the top of my head which one was the paddler and which the paddlee.

That means something. And America’s appalling inability to parse that meaning, well, that means something too. Specifically, it means something about the efficacy of our educational system.