Life is short

It's been awhile since I've written. I haven't had much of a reason to write. Or maybe I'm just busy. Well, we all know that isn't the case. Afterall, NYC teachers don't work, at all. Or maybe just teachers as a whole. Everyone knows we have the easiest job in the world, and that it will only be a short time till we get the whole summer off. Then we can gloat about how we don't have to work, and continue with stealing money from the "hard working" people in private industry.

Do note my heavy use of sarcasm.

One thing that bugs me is that if people really want to reform education, why don't we all just sit down and hammer out a solution? Granted, the problems are ten fold, there is no one reason why things are so bad, nor are there one or two solutions. It is a larger problem, and to go on would be repeating what everyone else has said, so I will be brief. Society itself is the big major issue that everyone understands but figures nothing can be done about it. Come on, it's staring you in the face.

It isn't bad teachers. If kids were raised right, Bozo the clown could be teaching the class and kids would still excel. It's true, intrinsic motivation, I think we call it. When a student has a motivation to succeed without any help, or candy. Or paying people more to the job more. Can I talk a little about how insulting merit pay? Do people do a better job if they are paid more? I don't think so. You pay them more to reward them for the good work they have done. But they aren't going to necessarily work harder. They might work longer, well, actually, no they won't. They worked longer to get the pay raise. And soon they can work shorter. If I don't make any sense, feel free to stop me and ask what they heck I am talking about.

We could blame the parents, but that's so obvious, I won't bother. We could blame the mayor, but again, that's obvious, and no one is listening anyway, not the Post, Daily, not even the NY Times (Though they did have a good article on Dictator Academy a few weeks ago. And really, is it any surprise that the majority of the people who graduate from this place are hated by the schools they run?).

I blame society instead. For making kids so dependent on electronics. In the 80s, we all had video games, and that was a distraction, surely. But there were restrictions. If I was failing, the video games were taken away. Which was easy, since they were in the basement. Think of why kids say they need the cellphone. What if their parents call them for an emergency? Now, this will most likely never happen, and we all know the reason is b.s. and they really want to text their friend in the next class. Being someone who loathes texting, doesn't get it and probably never will, I throw it in their face with their class grade. Scoreboard.

Society does make people more dependent. Think of mass media. Mass media dictates what Americans should and should not like. If every radio station decided to play Metallica and Killswitch Engage, I guarantee you'd see much more kids with those shirts in school. There's a reason why music styles run in cycles. Mass media elected our president. If the papers decided they liked Hillary more, she'd be our president, most likely. Which would be better for teachers, lord knows Obama's plan is a nightmare scenario that might actually make NCLB look like a stroke of genius.

In other words, what am I saying? We are all puppets. None of us really thinks for ourselves, since we only think what we are told to think, and really we are all slaves. There's another idea, Institutional Slavery, which was coined at my work for what these kids are basically put through, which I will explore another time when it is not almost midnight.