No sympathy for teachers

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. – Oscar Wilde

It will hardly matter to the rabble, but it’s important to note that, not only have I previously penned a series of columns supporting teachers, but my wife is one – the middle school variety to be exact. The latter should mitigate any “you’re anti-teacher” and “you don’t know what you’re taking about” claims, while the former should make it much more difficult to dismiss me outright.

That said, the slew of self-serving social media posts outlining the reasons teachers are fleeing the field in droves draw all manner self-righteous sympathetic responses, but I can’t muster either. In fact, I believe this self-imposed professional purge will ultimately be a good thing.

It starts with the two professions that, despite all the obvious difficulties, persistently attract starry-eyed youths convinced they’ll change the world – police officer and teacher. At least the law enforcement option doesn’t require a college degree, but teacher does, and the tales of college seniors, who in the course of their first student teaching assignment, realize the job isn’t for them are far more common than you might think.

But they’ve spent too much time and money to walk away, so they persevere into a profession that makes them miserable.

Even those idealists who eagerly press forward are often brought up short by overly difficult administrators, overly entitled parents, overly spoiled children, hyper-partisan politics, and a system that pits taxpayers against school districts.

It’s not an easy gig. And that was pre-COVID!

But the incredible irony educators everywhere are missing is the two most frequent arguments for their great resignation are entirely self-inflicted circumstances.

The first is the rapid deterioration of their students’ post-pandemic behavior, but who’s fault is that? Of the vast array of people on this planet, what group would you expect to apply critical thinking enroute to fully grasping the concept cause and effect? That’s right – teachers!

But instead of employing that possibility, they ignored that glaring remote learning peril in their headlong rush to teach from the luxury of their bedrooms. Worse yet, that terrible decision was predicated on fictitious press pandemic panic porn and “following the science” as long as the science aligned with teachers’ progressive and work-from-home ideology.

When angry parents finally forced a return to the classroom, failing to learn from their first mistake, teachers compounded it by demanding the use of ineffective cloth masks which further damaged their students who weren’t at risk for much of anything.

Who could’ve predicted that two years of enforced isolation and persistent mask wearing would lead to plummeting test scores, decreased classroom cooperation, increased aggression, stunted social and physical development, and all manner of mental health issues that school districts can’t even begin to address?

If it was up to Chicago public school teachers they’d still be remote. Perhaps students are “less cooperative” because they know their educators sold them out for the worst kind of self-serving reasons. If teachers wants to finger the primary perp for the plague’s deleterious effects on their young charges, my humble suggestion would be to start by looking in the bathroom mirror.

That brings us to our second resignation reason, “we can’t teach what we want to teach,” typically followed by a lament about today’s hyper-partisan politics.

No! You can’t teach what you want to teach, and the fact that you believe that you can belies the kind of ignorance and arrogance that’s truly terrifying on the part of those charged with taking on those two demons.

Name a job where you can set the rules and execute them as you see fit. It doesn’t exist. We elect school boards to set the curriculum and they hire a superintendent to carry it out. How is it that private school teachers understand they’re not social justice warriors, but you can’t begin to convince their public school counterparts that they’re not?

Put as simply as possible, you have NO right to foist your often-stilted morality on my child.

The massive irony there is teachers utterly failed to foresee how their abysmal pandemic decisions would wake parents up, and now that they are awake, in a textbook case of be careful what you wish for, teachers desperately want to force that genie back into the bottle.

Teachers love parental participation until it involves the smallest dose of constructive criticism.

I do wholeheartedly agree that most of the partisan political stuff is pure adulterated bullshit, but a great deal of the remaining parental concerns are not. The First Ward has previously tackled algebra story problems promoting progressive propaganda like critical race theory, and don’t even get me started on the “genderbread person.”

If you don’t want partisan politics invading your classroom then take it out of your freakin’ curriculum! It takes a special kind of obliviousness to believe that teaching the pseudo-science of gender fluidity isn’t going to generate a. How many times do I have to say that a person’s sexuality should be the last consideration of their character and not the first?

But when teachers insist on making it the first, it inevitably leads to the kind of bullying they regularly rail against.

Your job is to teach our children math, science, history, and English, not your version of social accountability. For better or worse, that’s our job. And the fact that you’re so convinced it’s yours in just as terrifying as your inability to comprehend the potential fallout from that level of blatant arrogance.

Your singular goal is to promote our children’s capacity for critical thinking, so, when presented with evidence as young adults, they can effectively make up their own minds. Instead, the vast majority of teachers believe in a patronizing noblesse oblige that means they have to make those decisions for them. A better word for it is “indoctrination.”

I dare any high school student to take even a moderate approach to the smallest LGBTQ issue and see what happens to their grade. Then teachers have the flippin’ nerve to wonder why parents are so angry.

So, no! I have absolutely no sympathy for today’s teachers who unilaterally brought the majority of this “misfortune” upon themselves, and I applaud those who’ve finally realized the job isn’t for them. It’s not an easy gig in the best of times.

My fondest wish is that our politicians, school districts, and educators would seize this opportunity to remake the profession into something far more sustainable, but the political will to make that happen doesn’t exist.

My abundantly simple expectation is for our teachers to generally be smarter than we are, but even though that’s not setting the bar very high, I continue to be very disappointed. To paraphrase the great Walt Kelly, “Teachers have met the enemy and it is them!”