Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Response to "The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom"

This is my response to /the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom that I stumbled across on Facebook.

Josh I can truly understand whatyou are saying,. I retired after 27+ years of teaching. I was tired of jumping through hoops and playing games. Tne amount of paperwork kept increasing and the time to teach seemed to be shrinking due to the increase in hoops. Too much time is spent having to parent students because their parents do not parent. 

More money is spent on sports than in the classroom and parents and community members are more likely to raise an uproar over a cut to hockey or football than teacher cuts or elective class cuts. Many parents get more upset over a snow day than a failing a grade because heaven forbid they have to find a babysitter. Parents do not come to conferences and even if thy do they talk the talk, but do not walk the walk. Kids who do not have money for basic school supplies come in wearing $100+ shoes and have money for the junk food machines or the latest phone, which many teachers cannot afford. I had students who asked me for change for a hundred dollar bill and they were surprised I did not have change as I was a teacher I made the big bucks. HAHA! Big buck, I wish. 

The community does not realize the money we put out for recertification, classes to recertify, and for classroom supplies. They seem to think it is all there and that we don’t really work that hard as we get summers off. They have not been there when we are at school at midnight making copies or grading papers or writing IEPs for special ed sudents, or at home doing many of these activities. They seem to think our job is SO EASY. 

Cuts raise class sizes which make teaching more of a wrestling match as we have to deal with crowd control rather than teach. I have been in 6th grade classrooms with 36+ students where you had to ask students to stand up and push in their chairs so you could get to the student who needed help. I have been in classrooms with 35+ high school students many of whom were hyperactive boys with no room to move so they are bothering everyone around them and I have spent more time trying to deal with behavior issues than I have trying to teach them to write a sentence. Students who are highly gifted and students who are so severely handicapped they need constant one-on-one care crowded into small rooms with inadequate heating, lighting, and too few textbooks do not make for a good learning environment. It simply becomes babysitting. 

Last year my husband had a class of students who simply wanted to play. They were interested in learning, or doing anything that could be considered work. They came to school simply to socialize and play. These were 8th graders. They were so far behind in school that they have no hope of getting a diploma and graduating and will probably drop out. 

It is sad to see how the future of our country has been hung out to dry with all the cuts to education. We are failing our country and our kids. Our governments, country, state, and city need to wake up and see that they are not helping our kids, they are hurting them. I think we need to institure a uniform policy, and allow corporal punishment in some cases as well as fully fund education and limit class sizes in all grades to 20 students. We also need to stop all this social emotional learning garbage and go back to a more rigourous and basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic with science, art and music and stop all the crap about we will hurt their feelings. I also think we need to tighten the reins of welfare but that topic is for another day.

I know that many of you know there was more to my decision to retire, including health issues, but waht I have said above is also true.  Yes, I continue to sub but it because I care about the students and want to help those I can. I do believe they are the future of our country and I would like to help those that I can to be successful contributing citizens to our society and to the future of our country, but our govenrment and the lacsidasical ideology of many members of our country is contributing the downfall and the destruction of our civilization as a whole.   As I said welfare and robbing the rich or rather middle class to pay the poor is getting to the point where there will soon beno middle class.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Bandwith Issues Learning Experience

After much frustration for my husband regarding my computer eating up too much bandwith, he discovered the culprit. He was searching through my computer looking at the sites I surf the most and he discovered that one of my often visited sites The Toothfairy Quilter eats up lots of bandwidth because she does not archive her pages so that only one page at a time shows, which until today was the same with mine. Now that I know why my pages eat up so much bandwidth I now have my blog set so that only one page shows at a time instead of a chain of pages going back to the beginning of my blog.

My husband says this makes a huge difference in the amount of bandwidth that my computer uses. I have now changed my blogs to all reflect this and it has solved some of the issues we were having.

For those that want to make this change go to  your SETTINGS: POSTS AND COMMENTS and set the following at 1. Mine was set at 7 which I am assuming is the default.  Now that it is set at 1 I am not hogging all the bandwidth when I am on my own blogs and updating them.

Posts 

Hopefully this will help others who are experiencing similar issues.
 

It Is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to Pay Off Your College Loan

  There is a key point that the leftist are totally missing in their, asinine argument, saying that the government should pay off student lo...