For years now the plan has been that I would be an English teacher. Don't let the occasional typo and slang-ridden silliness that is this blog fool you. I'm damn good at it.
But I'm begining to see that as much as I like teaching, as wonderful as it is to see a student's eyes light up when they finally get it, I can't teach at the school I'm at much longer.
The job is only 50% teaching see. The rest is control, power, authority. Forcing kids to "learn". The more I think about it the more it makes me feel dirty. They have no choice. They'll be punished if they don't go, and I'll be complicit in that.
Do that to an adult, force them to be somewhere, do something, for no pay under government edict, and that's called slavery.
And don't tell me I'm being over dramatic. Its true. These kids are forced to attend school, unless they want to suffer the consequences, which no kid does.
If you think I'm making this stuff up, think of this, when I asked my boss how I was doing she told me I was doing very well, but I was too nice to the kids. As she put it "A teacher shouldn't smile until after Christmas".
The kids should be afraid of me, apparently.
Cause nothing breeds mutual respect like being bullied into learning by someone appointed over you.
Does anyone see how wrong this is???
6 comments:
You know, as lopsided as your argument sounds...its right. The main reason people see this sort of argument as wrong is because its so *ohhh my god it can't be* anarchist, which flies in the face of what could be called traditional values.
The way most people see it is that kids can't think for themselves, which if you think about it is either a huge oxymoron and/or totalitarian.
Thank the heavens Sma is here for the rescue.
Thanks man, I needed that!
Have them read Mark Steel;
"[...]I was leaning something else about authority; that sometimes you could get away wth not doing as you were told, as long as you were prepared to carry on not doing it. If you skipped school, you got detention. But what difference did that make if you didn't go to the detention either? All they could do was give you double and treble detention until you owed them thousands of years of detentions. So I stopped going altogether, and the headmaster wrote a letter summoning me to his office, where he told me I was expelled. Fantastic! The punishment for not coming in was not being allowed to come in! It was like a judge sentencing a bankrobber to being paid 50,000!"
Have them read Reasons To Be Cheerful, and you'll kill two capitalists with one stone; get out of teaching, and hopefully spark a mini-revolt against the oppressive school system!
P.s. I know I give you crap over spelling and such. Sry, i jus like u no, like playin kikcin the uhmericun!
The thing is man, the school system here is so ass-backwards that even when I was working as a...whatchamacallit...stuðningsfulltrúi, I used to cringe whenever a kid "acted up" he was labelled with ADD, bad parents (pick a version - drunk, non-attentive etc.). Anything that would deflect the argument from the fact that the kids were forced to learn something that they didn't want to learn.
Of course you could argue that some of the kids were just lazy or mean, and you'd probably be right but the fact stands that for the most part kids aren't challenged with fun stuff in school; they aren't allowed to pick books they would like to read (although some of the kids I helped in learning comprehension were reading the Goblet of Fire and the Order of Pheonix at the age of 8) or tackle subjects within a given course that they liked to learn about.
Should I be setting up my own blog about this...?
Anyway, I've been in the trenches man and I did not like it.
The real question is, should we be starting up a Free School and showing the world how to do it right?
Yeah, try getting the government here to accept something like the Summerhill model! That'll work.
I sound so..Icelandic, don't I?
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