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Teachers Beware: Parents Are Watching
“I could never homeschool.” It’s something I used to hear all the time, but haven’t in months. After an entire spring of all of my friends are also home with their children full-time, overseeing their education as they participate in “distance learning” with their school, I don’t hear that much anymore. This summer, school districts across the country announced that they would be doing “virtual” school this fall (at least) and a fair number of friends lost patience with the idea of “distance learning” and decided to formally homeschool their children next year.
Parental approval of homeschool has skyrocketed over the summer according to studies,
New national survey finds a huge spike in support for homeschooling:
"Much More Favorable"
May: 26%
June: 25%
July: 43% pic.twitter.com/ozwSulbeZx— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) August 6, 2020
Why is that? In my opinion, it’s because they’re seeing that they can actually homeschool, because for the first time, they’re seeing what kind of education their kids are actually getting in schools. Millions of parents have realized that teachers don’t have superpowers; and if the kids are going to be home anyway, they might as well be the ones setting the curriculum and schedule for their families.
And then there’s this:
Parents aren’t just realizing that they can, in fact, do the jobs of teachers, but they can do it without the indoctrination as well. This is the Twitter account of an educator in Chicago, and before he locked his Twitter account after thousands of American parents sounded the alarm, other educators chimed in about how they too were concerned with parents overhearing their lessons as well.
There aren’t many silver linings to this time in American history, but parents recognize the nature of what’s happening inside the schools their kids were enrolled in may just be the brightest.
Published in General
Too many teachers have also been protesting with signs like ‘I didn’t sign up to be a martyr’…you know what? Grocery store workers, warehouse workers, air traffic controllers, all manage to go to work without that kind of anticipatory self-pity.
I think this is likely to have a long-term impact on the ‘brand’ of the public-school teacher profession.
And that’s before even considering the extreme case of those California teachers who refuse to work unless the entire society is restructured per their demands.
I’m waiting to see how the Blue city/Blue state teacher’s unions and the local politicians figure out how to legislate some sort of parental ban on viewing remote learning classes — probably two-way video cameras and automatic failing grades for students if parents are seen in the room while classes are going on (which sounds absurd, but the left is so drunk on the idea that their moment is at hand, it means they have the hubris enough right now to think they can separate parents from their children for indoctrination purposes, even if the kids are never leaving home for classes).
Yikes! Parents are watching!!
The left either needs to go back to concealing its true nature or else win the next election completely because if people are still free to act upon choices and perceptions, the public schools and the colleges are about to take a much-deserved hit.
The defective products of our educational system created Antifa and BLM and the cancel culture. The is a huge unmet market for quality education (Remember when Newt Gingrich created an American History college class which was franchised to colleges–top quality lecturers, materials, and the colleges provided teachers for the seminar/discussion sessions/exams and issued credit. Way ahead of its time…)
There is also a market for de-programming education for prospective corporate employees. I would like to see something like this as the norm:
That is the most appalling thing I’ve ever read. Conservatives have no business subjecting their kids to regular public schools. And neither does anyone else really, but they’ll be harder to convince. It’s child abuse, straight up.
Public education delenda est!
This is outstanding. I don’t hold my breath for this being widely adopted, but I can keep a copy and hope.
It creates a conundrum for the progressive teachers and their unions right now due to COVID. In their ideal world, they’re paid in full not to teach until a vaccine is found and/or the Nov. 3 election, which even liberal taxpayers likely would get annoyed over pretty quickly. No. 2 on their list is to be paid but not have to go to school and teach in-class, but instead to do it via remote learning, because they want to keep the coronavirus hype going at least through 11/3/20.
But the problem of parents being able to look in on the classes has mucked up that plan, which already is sitting on the reality that parents know the remote learning efforts between March and June were a train wreck (something even the teachers know if they’re being honest with themselves). So the options are go back to in-class teaching, which would go against the narrative that the COVID crisis is still as bad now as it was in the spring, or do remote learning, where parents can hear and see what’s going on.
The other option, as I said above, is to figure out a way to legally punish the parents and/or the students if the parents watch or listen in on the classes. That idea sounds completely totalitarian, but the people fretting about their classes being audited by mom and dad really do have the “It Takes a Village” mindset, where your children don’t belong to you — they belong to the government to mold as they see fit, and they don’t want wrong-thinking parents to question the lesson plans or see any indoctrination.
They want transparency prevention—-an “iron curtain“ around their classrooms.
It really is chilling.
Now is the time for an aggressive broad-based push for widespread school choice. Every parent in the country should have the ability to choose their child’s school. The Left is using the pandemic as an opportunity to push for sweeping changes, we should be doing the same when it comes to education
Bodycams for teachers!
Yeah, the virus is a serious thing. That said the people with the most “the sky is falling” attitude in my area are the teachers. Not grocery store workers or medical professionals. The out of control hysteria of the teachers is actually off putting to a lot of parents.
Calmly saying “i have some concerns” would be ok, but I have seen a local teacher’s facebook post calling parents Murders if the send kids to school. The “brand” is being damaged.
If you have a teacher who is in a high-risk group, either due to be older or pre-existing conditions, then yes, don’t force them to go into class, and if there’s a way to allow them to do remote teaching, fine. But it’s the freak-out by some, especially the big union backers, about their lives being in utter peril (as with the protesting teachers writing wills and sending them to government officials, or carrying coffins to protest), while millions of people are working in jobs that requires daily close contact with the public that is costing teachers sympathy.
“So, this fall virtual class discussions will have many potential spectators – parents, siblings, etc – in the same room. We’ll never be quite sure who is overhearing the discourse. What does this do for our equity/inclusion work?”
How can we teach the little comrades equity and inclusion if we can’t exclude their parents and everyone else?
“How much have students depended on the (somewhat) secure barriers of our physical classrooms to encourage vulnerability? How many of us have installed some version of “what happens here stays here” to help this?”
You know who else likes to encourage vulnerability in children and to keep what they do with them a secret from their parents?
Child molesters, that’s who.
These people are well and truly evil.
I would love the parents to have a live feed of exactly what their kids are doing while I’m trying to teach.
It’s only fair since they create the antifa/BLM.
I’d bet money that the teacher’s calling parents murderers are SJW types.
Unlike everyone else who “did not sign up” on the list, teachers are the best paid of the bunch… If a Grocery store cashier is taking the risk for far less money (and frankly a far greater risk) then they should too.
Please. Keep the focus on the unions and the individuals who choose to reveal their personal politics. I taught in public school for 21 years and the majority of my colleagues were tepidly political even when voting D in elections. Hopefully this comment was flippant but it’s the kind of thing that ends up sticking to most teachers like George Floyd images applied to all cops.
I’m of the “if they get in trouble in school, they’ll be in even worse trouble when they get home” school of thought.
Proving that teachers are not “heroes.” Indeed, they are primary villains in our society, the most important agents of leftist indoctrination that results in both of Senator Ted Cruz‘s daughters spontaneously exclaiming that Thomas Jefferson was a Bad Man, as they were taught in K-12 school.
https://youtu.be/3i61Kx2p4gQ?t=1572
The institutional root of evil in our society are the colleges as Harry Jaffa has noticed. He gets one thing wrong though. Nihilism leads to Wokism. Post-modernism leads to some kind of leftism. I am not entirely sure why that is but the same people who believe that nothing is right or wrong it’s all an opinion are the same people who believe that all whites are racist. There is a nihilistic bent in anti-fa but there is also a perverted cry for justice.
They wouldn’t know justice if it bit them on the a. . bahookie. When your moral code is subjective, it will always end up incoherent.
Truly. The left has nearly monopolized public education, and needs only to completely obscure what they’re doing to make their control absolute.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/23/harvard-professor-wants-to-ban-authoritarian-homeschooling/
This woman is crazy
https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/05/right-now-risks-homeschooling
I guess children need union representation
Nine Eleven and all the security measures helped this iron curtain come about.
I tried to get a tutoring program up and running at a local community jr college, but there were so many hurdles to jump through to prove that myself and my cohort of obviously terrorist-oriented retired math teacher friends might actually contribute to that campus, I gave up.
Hmm… People on The Left used to state that we on the Right were not smart enough to teach our children. Apparently now we are not only smart enough to teach our children, but our lesson plans will include total mind control over our progeny.
I don’t know anything about technology. But, I do know my daughter fired a babysitter because something my youngest grandchild said prompted my daughter to check something she calls “the webcam”. She (my daughter) discovered, in doing so, that the new babysitter had been, in her parental opinion, “verbally abusive” to her kids, especially the little one.
Is there any way something can be set up in schools, public or private, so that parents have a webcam to check. As for online learning, of course parents should always be able to sit in on their kids’ online classes.
Better than government teachers having total mind control over our progeny.
Why do they need to obscure stuff. If what they are saying is True, why not express it openly?