jfiling

Comment Threads

• justi121883 commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  I spent the last two years teaching middle- and high-school English. It takes 10-15 hours a day to do the job well, which I tried my best to do. It also takes some unpaid part-time prep work over the summers (for example, reading and analyzing the year's books, drafting unit plans, professional development, etc). If you're lazy and you don't care if your coworkers think you're incompetent, you can get by with 8-9, plus a little on the weekends--but nearly every teacher I've known has put in 50-60 hours per week during the school year. The problem is that the...
• Takuan commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  the teacher's hands are not tied regarding discipline. That is to say, only the decent human being teacher's hands are tied. Any others can easily use the system to destroy any student they wish....
• Tdawwg commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  It's ultimately about power: use it wisely, fairly, humanely, or abuse it and lose your job, or let your students have it, and let them abuse power they don't know how to use. It's not about destroying students: it's about creating an atmosphere of openness, tolerance, and respect. Put another way: how do disruptive, abusive, troublemaking, etc., students aid the learning process? Answer: they don't. Reflexive anti-authoritarianism is as bad as those ills it would seek to replace, IMHO. And I'm a teacher, so I actually know what I'm talking about. Lead the class (a teacher's job), follow the class...
• spazzm commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  For instance, look at the Chicago garbage collector's strike from a few years back-- demands to make their obscenely high pay and benefits even higher lead to mountains of garbage piling up on the streets of Chicago until the city had to give in to the thugs. What makes you say they are thugs? Did they use violence or threats of violence? Or are they just 'thugs' because they refused to do a certain job at a certain pay? If the pay and benefits are so obscenely high, did you offer to do the job? If not, why not? If...
• spazzm commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  I'm saying that it is reasonable for the payment for jobs to be based on the level of specialized sills necessary to perform that job-- it is reasonable to think that jobs requiring a college degree should pay more than a job requiring only a high school degree. Wow, here I had you figured for a free-market fundamentalist, and now it turns out you want to scrap the free market. What do you propose to replace it - government regulation of pay scales? In a free market, it's reasonable to assume that a job that few are willing to do...