As I have been working hard today, I thought I'd take a break and post. Lucky you.
This post is for Pablo, my buddy who is a dedicated (if by dedicated you mean cranky, overworked and underpaid) New York City public school teacher. Today is, after all, National Teacher Day. In honor of that, Pablo convinced his students that there is a pool on the roof of the school which all of the teachers have keys to and the straight A students get to use instead of going to gym class. This won't surprise you if you know Paulito - he is, after all, the kid who convinced our Spanish class in college that he was 40 years old (he was in fact 20) and he preserved himself by sleeping in a custom-made tupperware bed every night.
So yes, National Teacher Day. NPR's New York affiliate WNYC had an excellent story this morning about police in classrooms in Bronx schools. As usual, WNYC did a nice job of showing both sides - how the cops have made the schools safer, but they've also managed to piss off the students and crap all over the teachers. When one teacher questioned a cop who was handcuffing one of the students, the cop accused the teacher of obstructing and arrested him. And when the Bronx Guild principal tried to stop an officer from physically restraining a student who had cursed in the hall, he was arrested and charged with assault. The charges were later dropped. As the principal remarked: "Almost any behavior can be deemed as criminal. When is a kid’s emotional outburst an educational matter and when is it a criminal matter?"
Good question.
In other teacher news, giant red state Utah gives the finger to No Child Left Behind.
I forgot about the Tupperware bed. That was a good one.
ReplyDeleteThe No Child Left Behind Act sucks monkey balls. All it does it give us more standardized testing to tell us our kids are stupid without addressing the problem. It's like going to the doctor and having him say, "Yup, you're real sick. Sucks to be you. Have a good life. What's left of it, anyway."