Talking Baseball

I Know What You're Thinking Don't get upset. I come from a long line of educators. I am floored by the demands of the profession. People have no fucking idea. What teachers do for all of us is staggering.  Do you realize that the people teachers are trying to teach will soon be out on the STREET? What I'm talking about is the tone of some of the signs on some of the (long overdue) picket lines we've been seeing across the country in the last year or so. There's an embarrassing self-congratulatory aspect to the signs. Look, we all know what the broad strokes of the job are. If you entered the profession in the last 40 years and you weren't aware that Americans will REVILE you and pay you shit, then shame on you. Don't pat yourself on the back for making a "sacrifice". The only people who should be teaching are people who wouldn't be happy doing something else. Or people on their way to being administrators or blow-hard seminar givers.  ...

People Don't Want Your Pity The kids left under my care for periods of the day don't need my pity. Neither do their parents. They need my work. They need me to get off my recliner as an adult in the United States of Kiss My Ass and do something about income inequality. Do something about the privatization of public schools. Do something about housing. Make a connection with a red-neck? Perhaps. This idea of "reaching across the aisle" seems a bit suspect. I believe I need to do that within the confines of my heart.  "Judge not, lest ye be judged," type of thing. Jesus had a lot of good lines, didn't He? I watched some baseball tonight. Tuned into the Giants' victory at home over the Colorado Rockies. I watched my team hold onto a one-run game. It felt good. Panik and Posey reached in the bottom of the 8th with no outs. They were stranded. The feeling that the bullpen would then blow it was palpable in my living room. 

Poverty is the thing. I work in a school. Before I started I expected the parents to be apathetic or absent. The parents I've talked to care deeply. The problem, as I see it, is that they are poor. We talk and talk about this or that. The simple truth is that poverty is fucking people in the ass. Public education has been under assault for 40+ years. I used to think that standardized tests were a misguided attempt to measure student and teacher performance. After less than one year in a public middle school, I am convinced standardized testing is a tool to destroy public education. I'm beginning to wonder the same about Common Core. Another thing I'm dealing with is how boring is the content I'm hired to teach these kids. I realized today that I've been hired to sell swampland in Florida. "...sell you dirt to fucking deadbeats money in the mattress..."                              -Richard Roma in Gleng...