Anyone my age or older, remembers a time when classroom teachers were a highly respected group of individuals. Back-in-the-day, the general public believed that educating children was one of the cornerstones of a strong American, and those who dedicated their lives to doing so were at the top of its list of unsung heroes.
Today quite the opposite seems true. Society has singled out educators as the social piñata they find most convenient to whack using a very broad stick. No longer admired as dedicated or even hard working, many consider teachers as public employees who essentially baby-sit society’s kids, while circling dates on the calendar as they wait for the next school vacation.
Obviously, there are those in the teaching profession for whom working with children was a flawed vocational choice. But examples of the inept can be found in every occupation. To allow this minority to spawn a negative stereotype across the ranks, seems not only unfair, but considerably shortsighted.
So, for any “haters” out there who are eager to tar all teachers with such a demoralizing, “one size fits all” brush, I share this spoof e-mail I received recently, hoping it will offer some insight into the minimum requirements for which every classroom teacher is responsible. Posed creatively as the plot of an upcoming, but fictitious Survivor Series, it proffers the tongue-in-cheek premise that if one really wants a challenge in life where only the strong survive, just find a GOOD teacher and walk in his or her footsteps for as long as you can take it.
----------------------------------------------- TO: Paisano
SUBJECT: Next Season On Survivor
Have you heard about the next planned "Survivor" show?
Three businessmen and three businesswomen will be dropped in an elementary school classroom for one school year. Each business person will be provided with a copy of his/her school district's curriculum, and a class of 20-25 students.
Each class will have a minimum of five learning-disabled children, three with A.D.H.D., one gifted child, and two who speak only limited English. Three students will be labeled with severe behavior problems.
Each business person must complete lesson plans at least three days in advance, with annotations for curriculum objectives, and they must modify, organize, or create their materials accordingly. They will be required to not only teach students, but handle misconduct, implement technology, document attendance, write referrals, correct homework, make bulletin boards, compute grades, complete report cards, document benchmarks, communicate with parents, and arrange and attend parent conferences, as well. They must also stand in their doorway between class changes to monitor students, and pull yard duty whenever it is assigned.
In addition, they will complete fire drills, earthquake drills, and [Code Red] drills for shooting attacks each month.
They must attend workshops, faculty meetings, and attend curriculum development meetings. They must also tutor students who are behind academically, and strive to get their two non-English speaking children proficient enough to take and pass the SOLS tests. If a teacher is sick or having a bad day, they must not let it show.
Each day they must incorporate reading, writing, math, science, and social studies into the program. They must maintain discipline and provide an educationally stimulating environment to motivate students at all times. If all students do not wish to cooperate, work, or learn, the teacher will be held responsible.
The business people will only have access to the public golf course on weekends, but with the papers taken home to be graded by Monday, they may not have the time use it. There will be no access to vendors who want to take them out to lunch, and lunch at school will be limited to thirty minutes, which is not counted as part of their work day. The business people will be permitted to use a student restroom, as long as another Survival candidate can supervise their class while they‘re gone.
If the copier is operable, they may make copies of necessary materials before, or after school. However, they cannot surpass their monthly limit of copies due to paper shortages. And, the business people must continually advance their professional education at their own expense, and on their own time.
The winner of this Season of Survivor will be allowed to return to their job in the private sector.
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(Note from Paisano: This e-mail most definitely did not originate in California. To find only TWO limited English students on one’s roster here, means the teacher was either hit by a bus on the way to school and is viewing his class list while in a comatose state, or was smoking herb before school, which caused him to overlook the “1” that preceded the “2” in the Limited English column.)
How someone perceives reality is based primarily on the life experiences through which he’s gone. Each event, whether common or unique to others of the species, helps form not only a unique point of view about most issues, but mentally defines the personal reality of his daily existence, as well.
Take this picture, for example. If I asked you, “What are those things in the carton?” I’m sure you’d say “eggs,” as would anyone else who had seen one before. But if I asked, “What is an egg?” that’s when a disparity of answers would arise, and each person’s explanation would be a reflection of his personal experiences with the white, oval object.
An unmarried hen, for example, might see it as a daily biological curse which leaves the slit below her tail rather sore. A married hen, on the other hand, might consider an egg as noble evidence of her motherly ability to propagate the species. However, if the hen in question happened to be unhappily married, she might look at that same egg as a cheap excuse for her philandering rooster husband to have nonconsensual sex with her every ten days or so.
A baby chick inside an egg might see it as a quiet and secure avian condominium, protection from the realities of a harsh and intimidating outside world. A chick that just hatched, however, might look back and consider that egg a small, restrictive cell from which it was necessary to escape by forcefully knocking a hole through the wall after twenty-one days of incarceration.
A retailer might see an egg as one of his best selling items in the dairy section. A senior citizen who just dropped and broke a dozen of them in Isle 6, however, might think they’re one more sign of approaching Alzheimer’s. Of course, the young clerk that has to clean up the mess, sees eggs (and clumsy old people) as something that complicates his life, and need not exist in the first place.
A political activist might consider an egg a volatile projectile he can throw at a corrupt civil servant in sign of protest. The targeted politician, however… (especially if he’s from Northern California), might consider that same egg a weapon of mass destruction, and try to legislate it out of existence. At the very least, he’d certainly mandate they all be hard boiled and inserted in every child’s McDonald’s Happy Meal instead of plastic toys.
The Easter Bunny probably sees eggs as his once-a-year chance to bask in the popular spotlight and reclaim his yearly twenty-four hours of fame. After all, the rest of the year he’s just a furry, long-eared nuisance that poops black pellets that babies think are raisins. Children, on the other hand, see those same eggs as a once-a-year joy… objects of edible art, dyed and decorated to be displayed in baskets brimming with fake cellophane grass, and marshmallow chicks lying amid jelly bean rubble.
A nutritionist might look at eggs and see an almost perfect food source, to be eaten or used as a healthy ingredient in the things we cook. A zealous vegan nutritionist, however, might say that eggs are orbs of plaque-filled, animal-derived sludge, which only serve to clog your arteries and make you die.
Humpty Dumpty deemed an egg a fine reflection of himself. Conversely, the King’s men saw the same object as a pile of gooey fragments that, since they couldn’t be put together again, had to be cleaned up and hauled to the royal dump.
A lexophile might look at an egg as creative inspiration. To him the former Humpty Dumpty might be an “eggsostentialist,” or when full of himself, an “eggomaniac.” His wife, Mrs. Dumpty, might work as an “eggzotic” dancer at the King’s palace, and have a voluptuous body due to “eggcessive eggsersize.” A poor speller, on the other hand, might just see it as an “eg.”
Obviously, the old cliché, “It is what it is,” may only be true to the person making the evaluation. Perhaps that’s what makes the world such an interesting place…… and so very screwed up!
It’s time to get out the BS Bag again, and toss in something that really ticked me off recently. To be “stuffed” are the over-helpful, Mother Teresa-style clerks at my local U.S. Post Office branch. They came to my attention the other day when I went to mail a small package. I planned to be in and out in less than three minutes, but my time in line ended up far exceeding the length of most S.W.A.T. team hostage rescues.
Of course, when I got there only two clerks were at their stations taking customers. The other three, I assume, had been tipped off that I was coming, and decided to bust my nads by taking their lunch and/or coffee breaks the minute they saw my Corolla roll into the parking lot. Two clerks for about five customers, however, didn’t seem too bad, so as I waited to advance my position, I started observing what was going on at the service counter.
Clerk One was trying to explain passport obtaining procedures to a gentleman who didn’t understand English very well. It was an interesting scene to watch… a Chinese postal clerk trying to speak Spanish to a guy I think spoke Portuguese or maybe Hungarian. Anyway, she was showing him the necessary forms and trying to explain how to fill them out. Then they began discussing his family members who were loitering near the Passport Application Door, which of course was locked because it was either the wrong time to be standing there, or the passport clerk thought that I was going to want a passport, too, so he exited the building just as his cagey cohorts had done earlier.
The second clerk, also the product of a mainland China job fair, was plying her rudimentary Spanish-speaking skills as she dealt with a little Hispanic lady who was trying to mail a package not much bigger than mine. Experiencing momentary optimism that the line would soon be moving, the clerk suddenly told the lady that the package was wrapped incorrectly, and needed to be redone. But instead of the patron relinquishing her spot and going away to correct the problem, the opposite occurred. The clerk began doing it for her, starting from cutting off the lady’s numerous string bindings, to removing the LA Times newspaper in which it was wrapped. Then she examined and repositioned the contents, shook the box to see if it rattled, closed the flaps, and circled the box with yards of colorful (and tax payer paid-for) postal tape, always making sure to cover each seam, each crease, and every possible air hole. When she was done many minutes later, the package looked like a gaudy, rectangular Egyptian mummy ready to be put in a postal sarcophagus.
Things didn’t get any more speedy during the next fifteen minutes. Clerk One was still trying to explain the passport “hours of operation” schedule, and that the ominous door to the passport cubicle was barred to the man and his family for operational, not personal reasons. And while it didn’t look like the man either understood or was buying the clerk’s “line,” they plodded forward by reviewing a long, itemized checklist of things that he and his clan would need to present, that is, if and when the door ever opened.
Back at Station Two, the clerk was now conducting a personal interview and actually filling out the necessary forms the little Hispanic lady needed to have her package signed for when it reached its destination. She also offered gentle encouragement as the elder patron scoured her purse for bits and pieces of paper on which said information was written. And of course, to complete the process, the clerk had to look up the city/state zip code which had been originally omitted, as well as determine which of the five rates the lady was willing to pay based on the time it would take the package to get to that previously unzip-coded address. Yikes!! It just went on, and on, and ON !!!
Now, lest you think I lack compassion for the weak, the helpless, or the inept…… postal customer, that is, you’d be wrong. And were you to intimate that I regularly disparage the dedicated souls whose job it is to serve their postal needs, you’d be wrong again. But there is a limit to my patience. I mean, when it takes longer to explain the passport process than it would take for me to hide the man and his family in the trunk of my car and drive them to their destination, that‘s bovine backwash. And when a postal clerk does everything for a customer except actually supply the objects to be shipped in her package, then that’s boiling bull borscht, as well.
What’s next… a diaper changing service for patrons whose kids drop a load in the waiting line? I mean, the “U. S.” in front of “Post Office” doesn’t stand for “unlimited services,” or “until satisfied.” Perhaps the solution is as simple as requiring customers who don’t speak English to bring an interpreter when conducting postal business. Or perhaps when the customers waiting in line drop to the floor in a skeletal heap due to waiting so long, a supervisor should intervene and move the process along. Something needs to be done. Either that or I’m going to save time and start walking my packages across the country.
Anyone my age or older, remembers a time when classroom teachers were a highly respected group of individuals. Back-in-the-day, the general public believed that educating children was one of the cornerstones of a strong American, and those who dedicated their lives to doing so were at the top of its list of unsung heroes.
