Directory of Anti-Teacher Trolls

This was written by Peter Greene who is a long time high school English teacher from New Hampshire. Greene tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here. 

by Peter Greene

It may or may not be a good idea to attempt reading all the pieces responding to the Vergara decision, but it's definitely a mistake to read the comments section for any of them.

If there is any group that has been emboldened by the California court's fact-free finding against teacher job protections, it has been the legion of anti-teacher trolls. From mainstreamish media like Slate to the usual bloggy outposts, teacher bashing trollery is in high gear.

So this seems like the perfect time to provide a directory of the basic varieties of internet teacher-haters you may encounter. (And remember-- don't feed them.)

Childless Troll

I don't have any kids, so why should I be paying any kinds of taxes to pay teachers salary? Cut their salary back to where I don't have to pay any taxes ever. Mind you, I still expect my doctor, neighbors, fellow voters, and every employed person I ever deal with to be an educated adult. I just don't want there to be any schools. I don't know how that's going to work. You're so smart, you figure it out.

Public Service Troll

People should work with children for free because it's such important work (also, musicians and artists should never want to be paid). When teachers complain about salary and benefits, it's unseemly. If they really cared about the children, teachers would happily live in a cardboard box just for the warm glow of satisfaction that comes from teaching. When teachers complain about no raise for eight years or trying to support their family, it just pisses me off-- don't they care about the children??

"Those Damn Unions" Troll

It's the damn teachers union. Teachers all want to go sleep at their desks because the union will protect them. The union does nothing but protect bad teachers. In fact, the union actually goes out, recruits bad teachers, and then cleverly forces administrations to give these crappy teachers tenure. The union also elected Obama President, and they have the power to bend all elected officials to their will (except for Rand Paul). Union leaders have a giant pile of money that they like to swim in a la Scrooge McDuck; they use it to buy all the elections and all the power.

Teacher Hater Troll

Teachers are the single biggest obstacle to education today. They are only in it for the power and the glory. Well, no-- they also became teachers because they knew that would put them in the best position to interfere with the education of American students, which is every teacher's goal. Teachers hate children, and they hate learning, so they become teachers so they can devote their entire lives to destroying those things. It's perfectly logical.

Race To The Bottom Troll

The guy who cooks the fries at McDonalds does not have tenure or make any more than minimum wage or get vacations, so neither should teachers. The guy who dropped out of school in tenth grade and now works part-time at Mega-Mart doesn't have job security, and he barely makes enough to pay his cellphone bill, so why should teachers not have to struggle, too? There are employers in this country who force their workers to toil in unconscionable conditions; why should we fight to improve those conditions when we can fight to drag teachers down to that crappy level instead.

Sad Bitter Memories Troll

I hated high school. My teachers were mean to me. I remember a couple who picked on me all the time just because I didn't do my work and slept in class a lot. And boy, they did a crappy job of teaching me anything. I sat in their classroom like a houseplant at least three days a week, and I didn't learn a thing. Boy, did they suck! Crappy teachers like that ought to be fired immediately! And that principal who yelled at me for setting fire to the library? That guy never liked me. Fire 'em all.

Unlikely Anecdote Troll

There was this one teacher in the town just over from where I went to school, and one day he brought in a nine millimeter machine gun and mowed down every kid in his first three classes. The principal was going to fire him, but the union said he couldn't because of tenure, so that guy just kept working there. They even put kids in his class who were related to the ones he shot. Tenure has to be made illegal right away.

Just Plain Wrong Troll

Tenure actually guarantees teachers a job for life, and then for thirty years after they retire and fifty years after they die. It's true. Once you get hired as a teacher you are guaranteed a paycheck with benefits for the next 150 years.

Confused Baloney Troll

If you really care about children and educational excellence, then you want to see teachers slapped down. The only way to foster excellence in education is by beating teachers down so they know their place. Only by beating everyone in the bucket can we get the cream to rise to the top.

Like A Business Troll

You know, in every other job, you get judged on your performance and then rewarded or fired accordingly. Personally, I would have been a useless lazy bastard at my job except that my boss was always looking over my shoulder. People suck unless you threaten them. Nobody threatens teachers enough; that's why they all suck. All the best businesses like, you know, big investment banks like Lehman Brothers or energy companies like Enron-- those totally function on accountability.

Fake Statistic Troll

It's a known fact that 63% of teachers failed high school shop class, and 43% are unable to even dress themselves. If you have a bad teacher in Kindergarten, it's a proven fact that you will make $1 trillion dollars less in life; also, you'll be plagued with adolescent acne until you're 34, and your children will be ugly. 92% of high school graduates last year were unable to read, and 46% of those were unable to even identify the English language. Also, 143% of urban teachers are "highly ineffective" and 52% of those are "grossly ineffective" and 24% of those actually give off waves that cause metal surfaces to rust. I ask you, how can we continue to support public education under these conditions.

Tin Hat Troll

Teachers are part of the Agenda 21 agenda, and will be used as tools to turn students into mindless puppets who will smother their parents in their beds at night. You can read all about it in the Codexes of the Postuleminatti.

Charter School Troll

All of these bad things only apply to public school. In charter schools, all students develop a cure for cancer and build pink unicorns from ordinary materials you can find around the house.

Accountability Troll

There are still poor children in this country who are doing poorly in school. That must be a teacher's fault. Hunt that teacher down and fire him, repeatedly.

Incoherent Rage Troll

Teachers just all suck with the suckiness think they're so smarty pants with their fancy college edumacations and don't even work a whole year or a whole day even they just work an hour and then twelve months off every summer resting up from just babysitting which any moron could do so fire them all because, suck gaaaaahhh.

If I missed any, you can just sign on as a Hey You Made A Serious Omission troll in the comments below.

This will be my last year teaching in the hospital -- here are 3 things I learned

This will be my last year teaching in a children's psychiatric assessment unit. Next school year, I will be moving to a middle school where I will be teaching grade 6 language arts, grade 6 social studies and grade 8 social studies.

I've spent almost four years teaching in the hospital, and I know that I am a better teacher for it -- I think I'm a better husband and father, too. Teaching in a children's psychiatric assessment unit has forever changed my perspective on what matters most.

Here are three things I have learned from teaching in the hospital:

1. Children who are loved at home, come to school to learn -- children who are not loved at home, come to school be loved. Too many of the children I taught over the last 4 years were suffering from a toxic combination of abuse and neglect. These children are not stupid or lazy, and they are not bad, but they are lost -- and our job is to help them find themselves.

These children are struggling with a wide range of problems from anger to depression to eating disorders to addictions, and yet there was a common denominator among almost everyone of the more than 500 children I taught in the last four years: Almost every single child I have worked with in the last four years thinks very little of themselves. Too many of these children hated themselves, wanted to hurt themselves and actively tried to kill themselves.

Over the last four years, we read a lot and we wrote a lot about topics that truly mattered to them, but not before I worked tirelessly to nurture a relationship with each of my students. This is why the best teachers understand that students will never care what you know until they know you care about them.

2. Children don't give adults a hard time -- they are just having a hard time. I can't tell you how many times I had to remind myself that the children who are the hardest to like, need us the most. When we understand that hurt people, hurt people, it's easier to see our students' struggles not as problems to be punished but as opportunities to be taught. This is why my teaching philosophy is defined by a purposeful shift away from doing things to students and a move towards working with them. This is why I proudly hang Thomas Gordon's words in my classroom:

The more you use power to try and control people, the less real influence you’ll have on their lives. 

3. Great teachers can do a lot -- overcoming poverty or inequity is not one of them. I've worked hard over my 15 years of teaching to become pretty darn good at it. I'm not great everyday, but I'm great more days than I'm not and I was humbled daily by factors that are completely out of my control such as poverty, abuse, neglect and mental health problems.

When I say that poverty and inequity matters, I am not making excuses, and I am not saying that poor children can't learn. What I am saying is that poverty and inequity stunts potential growth and explains why so many children struggle to learn and teachers struggle to teach.

Great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society.

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Teachers can lead government renewal

This was written by David King who is a former Alberta Minister of Education. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers' Association website.

by David King

The report of the Task Force for Teaching Excellence exemplifies the malaise in Alberta’s government today. Reading it saddens me. At the same time, it suggests the urgent need for the Alberta Teachers’ Association (and others) to undertake new and important projects.

The report raises issues basic to the long-term well-being of Alberta.

First, Alberta’s recent education policy and program initiatives (the work of the Inspiring Education process, the minister’s mandate letter from the former premier, the “new” Education Act, recent provincial budgets, curriculum initiatives) are not forward-looking, notwithstanding the willingness of education partners to put the best possible face on the government’s intentions. The conceptualization of education in all of this is outmoded, including the role of the teacher; the nature of transformative pedagogy; student needs in the middle of the 21st century; the balance between personal/private and social/public interests and needs; and the relationship of the economic model to public education.

The government is engaged in ad hoc decision making that appears to reflect ideology more than wisdom.

Second, these initiatives are not grounded in democracy: they are grounded in the idea that decisions should be made as close to the grassroots as possible, but that it should be the person at the pinnacle who makes the final choice about who gets to make decisions. Democracy holds that the citizens—the grassroots—should make that choice.

Even without a commitment to democracy, self-organizing systems and variable accountability models are emerging everywhere people work together, powerfully suggesting that hierarchical command-and-control models are obsolete. Yet the government continues to promote them. The biases of the government (presumably imposed on the task force) run counter to widespread positive experience about collaboration, decision making and implementation in these times.

The authors of the report know that the government is working the wrong side of the street, so the terminology of the report suggests that “Alberta’s education system is to become truly collaborative and inclusive” (p. 75 and elsewhere). How does this happen when the Alberta Teachers’ Association (as well as CASS, the ASBA and others) are effectively excluded and when “collaboration” is organized on a patronizing model? We need to remember that the creation of the task force, the terms of reference, and the structure for appointments, as well as the appointments themselves, were all vetted by a committee of caucus, if not the whole of caucus, and by Cabinet.

The tone of the report favours further centralization in the hands of the provincial government, and further marginalization of key actors—not only teachers, but also school boards, superintendents, principals and parents. To support its bias for centralization, the task force has wilfully neglected some important information about current practices and cherry-picked research.

In addition to any of the specific concerns that arise from such recommendations, the more dangerous result is that such centralization is contra-indicated in times of turmoil and uncertainty. The wise course of action is greater autonomy within broad parameters of accountability. For example, recommendation No. 1 is “That the Teaching Quality Standard be revised to align with Inspiring Education.” As someone who believes that much of what is in Inspiring Education is mediocre, alignment is not something I look forward to.

The task force might have done better work if it had been allowed (and encouraged) to express ideals, instead of being limited by the pragmatic restraints of a tired and unimaginative government. For example, could the task force have been free to recommend that “the Ministry introduce [instead of ‘consider the introduction of’] a mandatory one-year paid internship/articling program for all beginning teachers”? As it happens, I know something about internship: Alberta inaugurated one during my time as minister, suggested by good research. The Initiation to Teaching Project was suspended after one year because of financial considerations. But the experience did not compromise the ideal, and the research results are even stronger now. An internship is not simply desirable: it is also affordable, if we take the long view. Why didn't the task force have the courage to be forthright about this or other changes that would be demonstrably helpful?

In a similar vein, the task force makes no assessment of whether inadequate resources and/or inappropriate or excessive prescriptiveness in the past 10–40 years have contributed to the system’s challenges. Nor does the task force assess the financial investment necessary to implement its recommendations, or assert any claim that the government has a moral obligation to fund appropriately.

With this overview, a very careful analysis of the entire body of work—research as well as recommendations—of the task force is required.

Ultimately, however, teachers and all other Albertans must acknowledge that the government is working inside a broken model. The insiders are not prepared to abandon the model or change it as much as it needs to be changed. A change of leadership, or a change of party, is not going to make a difference. It falls to the ATA and others to begin the work of creating a new model of engagement and decision making, for better education and better life in Alberta.