Today, like many other days on the net, there is another negative story about teachers is circulating throughout DU, the internet, and the country at large. Somewhere, somehow a teacher is doing some outrageous act that gets people all in a tizzy, foaming at the mouth for that teacher's head on a platter, and outraged at teachers in general.
Nowhere do we hear the simple miracles that teachers perform everyday. Like reaching the yearly goals for a developmentally disabled student months early, and pressing on for that child to learn more. Like feeding, clothing, and teaching millions of low income students and being the surrogate parent for those kids because their own parents are too fucked up in one form or fashion to be the parent themselves. Or how teachers continue to impart learning to millions of kids, despite the machinations of corporations and government that are designed to eliminate public schools and teachers' careers.
Are there bad teachers, certainly, just like there are bad people in government, in business, in medicine and virtually every other profession. But the number of bad teachers pales compared to the number of good teachers, those who work late into the night in order to prepare for the next day, those who mentor students who have nobody else to turn to, those who persevere despite ongoing attacks by so called "experts" at the local, state and national level.
There has been an ongoing attack on teachers for the past thirty years, and as part of the ongoing attack there is an ongoing effort to denigrate teachers in general. Steady as a drumbeat, you can count on the media to stir up some outrage about teachers. From heinous acts committed by individual teachers to how much those snotty teachers are getting paid(they're rich, they get pensions and insurance!), the media pumps out a steady diet of bad teacher stories, hardly ever chiming in with stories about the simple miracles thousands of teachers perform everyday.
So please, remember this the next time you hear some story of a teacher doing some outrageous act halfway across the country. Just a few blocks away in your local school, underpaid, overstressed, underappreciated teachers are performing miracles large and small on a daily basis. They just don't get the same kind of press as bad teachers do.
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