The Biden administration is bringing back an Obama era policy of racial quotas in school discipline. One of the many problems that forced my exit from education was my experience with this policy, although I was not aware that the policy had ever ceased. Behavior that gets a white student suspended will not even merit a stern talking to if displayed by a black student.
Education
I am done
This article blames the school system because a high school student had a 0.13 grade point average and failed nearly every class he took. The student in question was absent 272 times in four years. He failed his classes for four years, and the first time the kid’s mother knew anything was during the final semester of his senior year? Yeah, mother of the year right there.
I have 133 students this year. Of those, more than half of them (68) are currently failing my course. Six of those students have a perfect zero for the current marking period, due to the fact that they have not turned in a single one of the fifteen assignments that has been assigned to them. In fact, more than half of my students have received at least 6 zeros. The mean grade for my students is a 48 percent.
Absenteeism is over the top. I have students who have been absent more than not. One of my students has only been in class six times so far this year. I have over a dozen students that I have not seen nor heard from since before Christmas.
There is nothing that I as a teacher can do. I teach, but the student has to show up and actually make an effort. I am tired of caring more about my students’ success than they or their parents.
In fact, I have had enough. I am done. I am putting in my two weeks’ notice tomorrow. Since spring break is coming up, my last day as a teacher will be next Friday. This morning, I was offered a job supervising techs at a nearby hospital. I accepted.
Back to the medical business.
Failure of Education
Why do I need to know this?
This is my answer to SiGraybeard:
There are many challenges to being a teacher in a failing high school. One of those challenges is the students have parents who are largely high school dropouts and drug addicts. They didn’t become that way because they value education. Kids emulate the behavior they see at home. Countering years of a parent who is ignorant and telling the child, “You don’t need to know that. You will never need to know how to use any of that stuff they make you learn. I graduated 20 years ago, and still haven’t used any of it,” is nearly impossible.
One of the things that I do is present the students with a digital photo album. It’s a photo story of my life. My time in the military. My time as a firefighter. A paramedic. A master SCUBA diver. I show them pictures of my travels. I show them how great life can be, and how different it can be from what they know. Then I tell them that the key to living an interesting life is education. That doesn’t mean college, necessarily. It could be a trade. Then I try to tie my lessons into a skill.
Kids, did you know that a bullet begins to fall from the acceleration of gravity as soon as it leaves the barrel of a gun? If a sniper shoots a bullet perfectly horizontal, and his watch falls off at the same time, the bullet and the watch will hit the ground at the same time. Then I prove it.
If four firefighters are on the fourth floor of a building, and there is 200 feet of firehose between the truck and their position, you have to add pressure to the water to account for friction and elevation. This is how you calculate just how much pressure you need to add in order to get them enough water to put out the fire.
Efficiency is important. Chemical reactions have efficiency. Some reactions are not perfect. Let’s say we are making drugs like in “Breaking Bad.” Let’s say that we know that our reaction is 90% efficient. (Pointing to kid in front row) Is John stealing from us, or are we losing product to inefficiency? If he is stealing, we need to whack him. Let’s do the math and see if John lives or not. (students all laugh) So we start by calculating…
I use examples to make the class fun, interesting, and relevant. Math isn’t racist, but a poor teacher can make it boring. Even these tactics fail more than half the time. The kids don’t care, their parents don’t care, and so the kids don’t even come to school more than half the time.
So many people fall back on the race card. It isn’t that my kid is absent and refusing to cooperate with the lessons. That would be an indictment of my parenting. It isn’t that my kid is becoming a gang member. A drug user. My daughter isn’t going to wind up as a stripper. No, all of this is the teacher’s fault. Not mine. Not my child’s. The teacher MUST be racist. Blaming racism is the same fundamental logic as 1930s Germans blaming the Jews- “It can’t be MY fault. It must be someone else’s fault.” The people need a scapegoat for their own failures.
Failure of Education
Free pass
As a comment on the past weekend’s Superbowl game, I want to comment in the post game interviews. Listen to these men speak, reflect on the fact that every one of them has a Bachelor’s degree, and think about the amount of academic rigor that it took to earn that degree. Tell me that athletes don’t get a free pass, and tell me again how a College degree means that you are educated:
Education
Combat pay
Taking a break from my trip report to talk about a news story that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel back in May:
Carver Middle School is an F rated school in the middle of the Pine Hills neighborhood, located west of Orlando, in Orange County. This school’s students tested in the lowest 3 percent of all students nationwide. In order to correct this, Orange county is attempting to lure the best teachers in the state to the school by offering an extra $20,000 a year to teachers willing to work there.
The problem is that the school is in a crime ridden, poverty stricken neighborhood. I have blogged about Pine Hills and its surrounding neighborhoods before. More than once. The school is 91% black, 6% Hispanic of any race, and less than 1% white. Seventy percent of the students receive free or reduced lunch.
Both the violent and non-violent crime rates in Pine Hills are double the national average. Police officers are shot and killed in the area of this school often enough that several streets in the area are named for fallen officers, and shootings happen there nearly every night. The local government repeatedly dumps millions of dollars into this blighted area in an attempt to “clean up” the crime problem, to no avail.
Currently, the teachers there are inexperienced first or second year teachers who transfer away at first opportunity. Teacher pay is tied to student performance, and combined with the crime in the neighborhood, teachers avoid the area like the plague.
Any teacher who accepts a job at this school is placing his or her life in jeopardy. A $20,000 bonus is not worth it, in my opinion. The plan likely will not work and be a waste of money, anyway. You cannot, no matter how good of a teacher you are, teach a student who does not want to learn. The crime problems need to be addressed, the gangs eliminated, the drugs under control, before you can convince the students to give up the thug lifestyle and learn.