Sure there's the deadly recession and the wars, and the fascist harpies on FOX chanting night and day for our destruction. But there's a whole 'nother world of problems out there too, like... education.
Obama Calls for a Sweeping Overhaul in Education Law, today's NY Times editorial hails movement toward National School Standards, at Last, and Texas conservatives are rewriting textbooks to make their battle against facts, logic, and decency sound heroic.
The way public schools churn out kids doomed to failure -- and the street corner and prison -- is the cruelest of social problems, and the most difficult to solve because school is where everything -- poverty, race, rights, religion, taxes, etc. -- hits the pavement, and because school systems are such large and complex organisms.
On a hopeful note, Building a Better Teacher unearths a few clues to the mystery of classroom success, in the hope that middling teachers can be turned into really effective ones. Two of the article's key ideas: there's a method to maintaining order and focus in the classroom, and teachers need to not just understand the subject they're teaching, but how it might be understood (and misunderstood) by 30 young minds.
Meanwhile, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change. They are concerned that students will not be ignorant enough to vote for them, so they're forcing textbook publishers to extol their "philosophy," which I believe has been distilled since Reagan to the verse...
What's mine is mine
What's yours is mine
And if you don't like it
F*ck you!
What's yours is mine
And if you don't like it
F*ck you!
...and stuff about how Republicans were 100% behind the Civil Rights movement until the Black Panthers arrived (carrying shotguns without NRA cards) and proved that Government is the Problem.
I was lucky enough to go to decent public schools. I had issues, misunderstood all kinds of stuff, and didn't take advantage of school the way I should have, but I remember some great teachers (and even administrators, like the grade school principal who rescued me from multiplication table failure, so I now have the ability to understand... just how financially screwed I am right now).
I've said before that I think a lot of the meaning of life has to do with what you pass along and, as one of the researchers profiled by Building a Better Teacher says, "You could change the world with a [great] first-year teacher."
