Well, teachers are some of the worst treated people profession-wise anyway....they're generally poorly paid, little respected, and regularily ripped into by politicians who either blame them for not being good enough for thier jobs and in need of "standards" to make them perform better (hence, No Child Left behind) or lazy bastards who need to be taken down a peg (how hard are ceetain people trying to abolish the Teachers' Union. Well, it's obvious that teaching is the last profession still unionized and protects its workers, everyone else has been "McDonald's-ized"-we have part-time nurses, doctors, college professors--(at the State University of NY system, SUNY Albany, there is a severe shortage of classes right now b/c the SUNY system statewide has laid off some 1,000 full-time staf fin the past decade and at SUNY Albany, the largest of the state uni system, only about 50% of the courses are taught by a full-time professor)--even lawyers. But we don't have part-time high school or lower level teachers and BOY there are politicians out there who would LOVE to see this happen, so kids can be more easily politically infunced by their agendas. They'd love to have control. That's my conspiracy theory anyway.
Headache, I've never read a more truthful and cogent summary of what's really wrong. You're right; the teacher has no control anymore. Not in the areas that matter. But at the same time, parents expect the teacher to be the babysitter, and even the parent in certain areas.....'cause they are too damn lazy or uniterested in being parents themselves. That, and they have them diagnosed with ADHD or some damned trumped-up mental disorder (what the
IS "social anxiety syndrome" anyway? Boy, what starving Third World kids or kids who do slave labor making our Nikes would do to have the luxury of having such exclusive attention.) I'm convinced that 80% of the kids on Prozac or Ritalin or whatever the heck the newest Merck hot seller is really don't need it.....they're just being KIDS, and need simple discipline, not a drug...... I know someone with a bipolar teen--I mean, who was REALLY bipolar, it's a lot more serious than these idots on sitcoms make out..it's more than just "mood swings"). THEY need drugs.
To bring U2 into this topic..this is a silly example, but I have to say it...if Paul Hewson was a teen in an American high school school today, he would have been diagnosed with every "syndrome" in the book , and that's BEFORE his mother died. Just for being HIM. But was he mentally ill? Did he have a "disorder"? Of course not. He was just a normal teen, with a charismatic personality and a hungering to explore the world around him. He could not keep still, or out of peoples' faces, I'll bet. No matter what trouble he must have stirred up, he was basically a good kid at heart. He didn't start turning violent and destrctive until after his mom died, but once he found the band and began his relationship with Ali, he calmed down. TO a degree
. But under the system we have now, I can only imagine wthe disciplinary methods that would have used against him at this stage. Boy, this is a crazy straying from the topic huh? "Case number 401: Paul Hewson, circa 1976: the Teen From Hell. What would YOU do? Pass this one around the school board. )
Or take Jeremy himself, the teenage Eddie Vedder. How he recounted getting up in front of his class and putting a gun to his head. Good thing this happened before Columbine!!
While many kids are genuine pains in the rear, there are many more who are just KIDS, and all they need is a PARENT WHO CARES ABOUT THEIR LIVES. That's all. If anyhting, these drugs might be making a doscipline problem wrose. Hear the latest aobut Prozac, BTW?
THe sad thing is, when your kids who reach college artifically, enter those doors, there won't be any professors acing them through like in high school. Unless your dad is a cororate CEO or a political figure, you still have to do the work. Nobody will hold your hand. And in a world where foreign enrollment esp in the science and technology fields is down by a third in the past 3 yrs, due to thenew visa policy, the spotlight and pressure will be for American-born students to ptoduce even more. And NCLB won't help in producing the future workers of this country if these policies continue.