New (MASS.) Teachers Union Chief is Unapologetically Adversarial

[mbperrin]

5. I've been teaching for 19 years at a large urban high school here in west Texas, and I have

never met any teacher with an attitude as you have described.

Standardized testing defines what will be taught and nothing else, because district money, administrative pay, teacher pay, facilities money, all revolve around those sacred results.

Now this is all strange, since no longitudinal study has ever followed a group of students from birth to death to find out what contributed most to happiness in their lives, and that's the only reason for living - happiness.

Students still come to the USA from all over the world to attend school here, because the simple fact is, we have success here - the world's largest economy, extremely high standard of living, especially for a large, high population country of heterogeneous makeup.

Without teachers, there is no education. And everyone teaches, by example and by word, all the time. This is why your type of post is quite distressing - it's similar to someone telling a child that the police are all corrupt, that all members of the government are out to get them, that people of different races and religions are evil. The fact is, it's simply not true, and while any profession has less-desirable elements in it, they don't last long without outside factors - relative, friend, huge scarcity in the field, or something else.

300 students a year, 6 hours in the classroom each day, hundreds of hours of preparation, worry, define, refine, include, reteach, retest, be observed, do observing, all culminate once a year for those who teach seniors, like I do, in graduation at 8:30 tonight, when hundreds of students will become graduates, and it will be my privilege to see them in my neighborhood, as I do and have for the last two decades, as they share their success, family photos, job woes and triumphs, temporary setbacks and major disasters in life with me. It's my absolute privilege and joy - not one of them has ever been unkind to me, nor ignored me in the real world in all these years.

Beats banking, graphics arts, baby pictures, insurance sales, truck tire sales, newspaper writing, construction, oilfield work all hollow, and is a far more demanding and difficult job with real consequences than any other those other jobs I held previously.