Back to School

There is a group of people who hear the words, “Back to School” and get a chronic case of running belly.  They dream of walking up stairs to the guillotine, or going down with the Titanic.

These people are teachers.

It is a job that becomes more thankless every year.  A job which drains energy and produces frustration.  A job which becoms last resort for most people who gain Liberal Arts degrees.

Way back in the Pliestocine Teachers were figures of fear and authority.  If a teacher gave a bad report to your parents you would be killed.  If you told your parents that the teacher hit you, they didn’t call their lawyer, they killed you.   In short, in those ancient days when parents could discipline their kids the Teacher was the sole arbiter of whether or not you should be killed.

Today, teachers can’t discpline and every kid knows it.  Set up at the front of the room as target practice she is to try to cram some knowledge into concretised brains.  Her only resort is to use the magic words to the principal to get a kid drugged out of his  mind to create a zombie.  Not that the kid will learn in the zombie state but that he’ll vegetate quietly.

Teaching is one of those fields in which the subject needs to participate in a process called learning.  If the kid doesn’t want to learn, the teacher can’t force him, and then have to justify the poor performance.

If a teacher can get a cushy gig at a private school the childreen may behave better in one aspect, but the son or daughter of the major beneficiary has carte blanc.

Everything a teacher does or says is reported.  Dare she slip and say the ‘wrong thing’…(and depending on where she is the wrong thing changes from evolution to Huck Finn)…trouble follows.

Unlike the kid who may hate school as an infringement on liberty, that hate pales to a slight like compared to that of the teacher who looks at vacationing in Gitmo.