Sunday, March 27, 2016

Teachers need to be treated with more respect and higher salaries.

After reading a few articles including: http://www.pe.com/articles/education-782341-teachers-teaching.html I wrote a response to the author.

Josh, I can truly understand what you are saying,. I retired after 27+ years of teaching.  I was tired of jumping through hoops and playing games. The 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 bucks, 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 students, 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. a few years back my husband had a class of students who simply wanted to play. They weren't 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 institute 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 rigorous 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.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Drawn From My Father's Adventures: Parquet and Piano

 I came across this blog by chance and the stories she tells are fascinating and drew me in to the world in a different time. I am inspired to blog some of the stories my father shared with me.
Drawn From My Father's Adventures: Parquet and Piano: "Click image to enlarge With the huge unemployment in postwar Germany our large house in Hamburg, which had been requisitioned from the fami..."

Reading this blog made me cry as I thought of my father. This month is the anniversary of his passing six years ago.  I still miss him and on occasion find myself reaching for the phone to call him.  We had a long period of time where we were out of touch for reasons I will not go into, but he was always my father and I loved him. I also miss him and remember the stories he told me.  Recently we lost his twin sister with whom he was always close.  There is only one member of his generation still living on his side of the family, his older brother Bob.  It is important to record and remember the stories of each generation and I have written down some of the stories my father shared with me. After reading the blog mentioned above I decided to share a few of my father's stories and my thoughts.

When he was a boy my father said he drove a milk wagon and delivered milk around Altamont and he told me of the time that someone cut off their toe with a lawn mower.  The toe was put on ice in the milk truck and he drove it to the doctor. I am not sure if he took the person or if they went in another vehicle, but he said that he put the toe on ice and delivered it to the doctor so it could be sewn back on.

He also talked about playing basketball in high school and I have his basket ball necklace or charm on a chain.  He said he enjoyed playing basketball even though he was not that good at it.

He also talked about hunting and fishing and told me stories about my grandparents when they were younger. He said grandpa use to go duck hunting, which is probably why my father did the same.  He also talked about his siblings and his twin sister.

One story I remember is that he use to ask his twin sister to go ask grandpa for money for the movies because he would always give it to her, but not to him. He said he was always in trouble for something.  He also said that she was never on grandpa's bad side.

He told me about his first trip over seas and when he stepped off the airplane in Benghazi North Africa his first thought was "Momma come get your baby boy."  I have pictures from his time there with all the tents out in that desert.  He said the water truck came through about once a week delivering water for drinking, cooking, and washing. They had to ration the water so it would last until the next truck cam through.  He said it was hot and miserable and you had sand everywhere.  You could not escape the sand especially when the wind would blow it through and you could not see your hand in front of your face.

He also talked about Germany and Korea and Vietnam and other places he was stationed and told me that some of them were places he had never been and others were places he would have liked to have had more time.

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...