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Maybe the Answer is New Teachers
Why did teachers get into teaching if they didn’t like to actually teach? It appears more and more likely that many decided to become teachers just in order to have a guaranteed paycheck and shorter hours with summers off? I’m sorry to sound jaded, but the response to this pandemic by unions, who represent teachers, has been to exploit the situation to buy themselves a year and counting of working from home, to heck with the consequences for kids. One of the biggest unions in the country is straight-up gaslighting Americans about what game they’re playing, posting on Twitter yesterday:
Here’s the truth: It’s sexist and misogynistic to keep schools closed. Over two million women have left the workforce because they have no school to send their kids to, and that number is only going to grow over time as more and more parents are forced to choose between their children and their jobs.
The Washington Post calls this generation of kids left abandoned by “distance learning” the lost generation, and the closure of schools has only exacerbated preexisting disparities in education for children of color. If that’s not racism, I’m not sure what is.
How much longer are progressives going to allow teachers and their unions to keep telling us the sky isn’t blue?
Published in General
The teachers’ unions are just another example of our country being browbeaten by the Left. How is this possible?
Because most Americans devote their time and energy to their families and providing for them, whereas the Leftist devote their time and energy to molding society to conform to their ideas of Utopia (with themselves in charge).
Standard response from the left about anything that they don’t like:
“The push to [fill in the blank] is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
Misogyny? How many of those teachers are men? I’m guessing a lot more than were men in the 1970s. And how many of those teachers are white and Asian? Probably a majority. B.S.
The Chicago Teachers Union is allowed to post something like that? Disgusting – they are perpetuating the identity politics instead of teaching kids the basics to get through life!
By Leftist rules anything with disparate impact on races is systemically racist, so feel free throw insults at the union. Public sector unions are bad for society. It took a long time for things to get this bad, so we need to prepare to spend a lot of years to make things better.
BTW, why isn’t that tweet subject to fact-checking, Twitter-style. Sounds like a “conspiracy theory” to me.
Nope, the answer is throw out the teachers union. When Wisconsin passed their right-to-work law, union membership plummeted.
I don’t understand why they’re so powerful. We’d have much better schools at all levels if there were no unions and even better if each school were managed by the teachers and the parents with no supervising bureaucracy, money following the students. DonG, we can’t do it over years as they’re organized focused and funded by what they do. We aren’t. We have to take it on where there are Republican governors, each state as soon and as aggressively as possible. It can’t be done nationally. Too many Democrats.
These stay-at-home teachers are obtaining their groceries and Amazon purchases due to the work of people who are *not* staying at home: warehouse workers, truck drivers, pilots and air traffic controllers, and lots of others. They are claiming aristocratic privilege without taking aristocratic responsibility.
A deeper issue is that too many ‘educators’ don’t really put any value on ‘knowledge’…and they don’t believe that anyone else does, either. This is why they have to dress everything up to make it ‘relevant.’
The bottom line to a tweet like this is simple: The unions want to nationalize the K-12 education system. They desperately want to find a way out of local schools with local school boards.
Think of what this would accomplish: Interdistrict busing, the ability to rob suburban schools of their income, the ability to crush transportation to private schools (and maybe the private schools themselves) and the ability to threaten everything nationwide with job actions. No more contract negotiations with hostile boards. A national contract with the Department of Education and all the benefits of “negotiating” with political entities you have bought and paid for. They want the keys to the kingdom and Joe Biden will give it to them if he has the chance.
Abolish compulsory education.
For what it’s worth, the teachers I know in my area are working twice as hard. I was just talking to a high school French teacher, who now has to prepare lessons for two separate sets of kids, one “online” and one “in-class” (they alternate, to make more space between them); it is much harder to know who is falling behind and, of course, much more awkward and fiddly to set up times to help. At intervals, someone at the school goes to be tested for COVID, and the teachers are all told to be prepared to switch entirely to on-line teaching with less than a day’s notice.
So I don’t think it is always and everywhere the same, and all teachers don’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
Having said that: Anytime anyone says “this is racist, sexist and misogynist” the speaker is an idiot.
Think of teachers’ unions as 5% labor union and 95% Democrat PAC and it all makes sense.
The worst thing to happen to humanity was the invention of social media. The second-worst was the invention of the modern system of public education. The third-worst (and related to the second-worst) was the invention of the teenager.
Most are in it for the feels. They love the idea of being teachers . . . sorry, did I say “teachers”? I meant to say educators.
All true.
Good teachers put up with an incredible amount of nonsense. Alas, much of it is nonsense generated by other teachers.
I’m a public school teacher and my county gave the option for families to do virtual or in-person…. I’ve been teaching in-person since August and it’s been great so far, praise Jesus! 🙌🏼
John Hinderaker at PowerLine posted on this subject today.
The person handling the teacher’s union’s Twitter feed probably came up through the Chicago public school system and had the wokest of liberal arts educations at some college, and has had those buzzwords driven into his or her head for at least 15-20 years.
So when the teacher’s union is under attack for not wanting to go into classes and actually teach students, when other schools have shown not to be COVID-spreaders, they simply throw “racism, sexism and misogyny” out there like Alec Baldwin or Geena Davis saying “Bettlejuice” three times in a row. Except that instead of hoping Michael Keaton will magically appear, they’re hoping those three words will scare all their critics into shame and silence, by targeting them not just with the race card, but with the gender card and possibly the homophobia cards (depending on how our tweeter wants to define ‘misogyny’).
It really is the end game for the identity politics crowd, where any attack on a group is justification for writing the critics out of the political conversation by branding them as hateful enemies of the group. And that in turn is done by tying political positions to racial and gender identity — the same mindset informs the virulent attack on members of those special interest groups who don’t follow the marching orders, something that Biden spelled out with his “If you don’t vote Democrat, you ain’t black” comment on that radio program back in June (in this case, it’s if you’re not with the Chicago Teacher’s Union, you’re racist, sexist and misogynistic).
It’s a way to shut down the conversation. It emboldens the ideologues and stifles the timid. Since racism, sexism and misogyny are systemic, anyone who denies the truth of the assertion is allied with the reactionary power structure, and has no standing to engage in the conversation.
I’m kind of relieved that people who think like this don’t want to teach children.
At least, anyone who uses expressions such as “sexist and misogynist” should not be teaching English composition. That is either redundant or contradictory.
What does it mean when Leftists accuse you of being a racist?
It means that they are losing the argument.
Oddly enough, it is often used by the same people who like to use the expression “America needs to have a conversation about [race, sex, misogyny].”
My father always said once teaching ceased being a calling – or a craft – and became a profession, it was doomed.
Credentialism combined with activism = bad results.
In retrospect, I can see the evidence from my elementary education in the 70s. Self esteem and leftist ideology were seeping into the curriculum. No letter grades: Outstanding, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. I had a history book in fourth or fifth grade that had a chapter on Cesar Chavez fer Chrissakes.
See also: journalism.