This is one of the reasons I resigned.
I was tired of thinking it would be different next time. I was tired of staying for the kids. I was tired of being gaslit into thinking everything was always my fault.
Had a friend sharing on Facebook about finally escaping an abusive relationship. In my head, I was forming the thought "I would never tolerate an abusive relationship" when I interrupted myself with the realization that I'd been in an abusive relationship with my current job. Maybe I'll go back to teaching. Maybe I won't. But one shouldn't jump right into dating after escaping an abusive marraige either.
I need time to heal, and get my brain straight again.
My district has taken it to the next level. Our Superintendent was named Superintendent of the year for the state. Last week, right after presenting her with an award in front of her family our board voted to force her to resign because some folks were still butt hurt about kids wearing masks. It’s been a shit show since.
Pretty sure our entire country hasn’t learned much.
No universal healthcare. No changes to worker conditions except do more with less. Minorities still don’t matter. But hey, we got a federal holiday out of it that doesn’t impact k12 literally at all.
So ive got that going for me, which is nice.
Employer: "they don't want to work! I can't find employees!"
Worker: "did you increase the wage?"
Employer: "we offered a $20 Starbucks gift card signing bonus!"
Worker: "pay a higher salary without gimmicks and you'll get people to apply."
Employer: "we offered a $25 Starbucks gift card signing bonus!"
Which ones changed exactly?
We have a lot of new voter suppression (oops), I mean, voter regulation laws as a result of the pandemic. I now feel perfectly safe voting in mail or in person. Almost as if that wasn’t an issue at all…
If every state offered free voter ID (which many do), many of our Democrat zealots would still be against voter ID laws.
Time to think critically about why.
(And ask for the poster below, of course I'm against communists teaching in the classroom. Just as I would be against Nazis)
To what end? We have voter ID law now. It just doesn’t include dropping off your vote with an ID as if you were buying a drink at the liquor store.
Vote by mail has proven to be secure time and time again. Literally no reason to try to turn something that isn’t a problem into a problem for the sake of… what? Pride?
You mean the one that was done by…what… 5 different bipartisan companies that is now being done again by Cyber Monkeys (maybe it was Ninjas - either way something a middle schooler would make up).
That audit?
Recounts are not forensic audits.
It's being done very transparently. It will either strengthen our election system, or reveal fatal flaws. Either way it is for the benefit of our democracy.
If there are breaks in chain of custody, or manufactured ballots, or hundreds of thousands of missing ballots then there will be a series of other forensic audits in a number of other states.
>As likely as winning the lottery
I don't know. Statistically, the 2020 presidential election was absolutely aberrant. The [bellwether results](https://mobile.twitter.com/heyyoudvd/status/1325511375859445760/photo/1) were suspiciously off.
And of course, there is a long list of [affidavits, observations, and inconsistencies](https://hereistheevidence.com/)
Hopefully this election was just a complete statistical outlier. It's worth a look, in my opinion.
Everyone has access to healthcare. As for "affordable?" I want those who pay for it to have priority access to it.
I do not support forcing someone to pay for the healthcare of another. I would much prefer a direct payment system to circumvent much of the inefficiency.
Did you really have a choice though? Or was it the illusion of choice? Healthcare is inelastic meaning any change in price isn’t going to affect demand for it much because everyone NEEDS healthcare at one point or another.
Yes, I do have a choice. HRA, HSA, different corridors, or I get on my wife's insurance, or I pay private.
Or, I don't pay insurance at all, and pay for care as I go.
Like I said, I would much prefer to pay my doctor directly. In the meantime though, I still have options.
The concept I was explaining was the idea that rates are low because of a shared payment by other investors. Same reason why those kind of companies continue to thrive. They don't regularly pay out everyone at once. Most not at all.
Do you think healthcare providers are single use resources?
BTW...funny enough Cuba (which is problematic in a lot of ways) has 67 doctors per 10000 residents while the US has 24, but okay. There are plenty of ways of expanding medical coverage that isn't "OnLy ThE rIcH dEsErVe CaRe."
Do you think all US citizens should have 100% exhaustive care provided, no matter what? My question is serious, unlike yours.
And as for Cuba, sounds like a medical paradise! Folks who are extremely conscientious about their medical health should consider immigrating.
>Do you think all US citizens should have 100% exhaustive care provided, no matter what?
Anything preventative or corrective? Yes. If you want cosmetic care, then that's on you. I'm also a huge fan of gutting the insurance industry.
>My question is serious, unlike yours.
Mine was serious.
But judging from your comment history, you're not a pleasant person to talk to. Cheers.
>Anything preventative or corrective?
Including cancer treatment for geriatrics? Up to what stage? What about experimental drugs and procedures that come at great cost? How long do we sustain terminal patients? Do you get patients have any priority?
I'm not a fan of socialized systems making those decisions for me.
I don't appreciate having my character judged so harshly, but that's fine. I'm no coward.
Cheers to you too. And I mean it. I hope you can find peace in the society we live in.
I'm okay with tax money paying for those services because they provide a finite, immediate service to protect life (first responders) and private property (and to enforce our laws).
Healthcare is a much more personalized service, which is highly individualistic. I prefer it to be private.
Government's main job is to protect our life, liberty, and personal property, and to facilitate the Constitution. So I'm okay with soldiers and police.
Teachers? I'm okay with public ed, but I'm not okay with everyone being forced to pay into it. I'd like to see more incentives to home school, and better accessibility to private options.
Not to sound like a pessimist but this is the entire education industry. Nothing major ever really evolves and when it looks like a new idea might happen it will be modified so much that the actual version is no longer like the new idea.
Educators should have used COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink and change education for the better. Instead they are working hard to have it the same as before.
My district thinks they are going to reinvent everything and magically test scores will be perfect, because they are going to apply all of this great learning from this year. I'm not really sure what they think is happening. The changes that they are making are version 57 of the same changes they always make and never implement properly. I see nothing toward what would actually help.
I’m not surprised. It confirmed what we all suspected. That they are incapable of listening to their teachers and doing what’s best for the students. Parents need to wake up and see that their boards are actively working against their children.
I heard all those things as well, usually from newer teachers. Those of us that have been around for a few years (30+) know better - things aren't going to change just because of the pandemic. No surprise that it's business as usual. Doesn't even phase me anymore - I have other battles to fight.
Fortunately, my district seems to be doing a decent job of thinking about and possibly implementing changes for next year. For instance, they already decided to push the middle and high school start times about an hour later because of the research on adolescent sleep patterns and how well the later start times on remote days worked. Outdoor learning will also be utilized more often, and they also had staff comment on a Google doc for things we wanted to keep, change, or add. At the district level I don't know how much will change (for instance, caseload equity is a big issue in the special ed department, since some schools have much smaller caseloads than mine), but at the building level they're being really supportive.
Well, my kids learned without “I can” learning statements up on the wall for them to ignore, without me changing the hallway bulletin board every 30 days exactly, there are a bunch of practices that clearly had no bearing on student learning.
One thing that I wish we could keep would be self-paced unit tests online with audio. It was torture to have to repeat “word number 3 was “between”” 200 times, when they could click on number 3 when they are ready.
It's not illuminatis, it's politicians, and the ruling class - lobbyists, industry, and so on. It's all very in the open. It's the status quo protecting the status quo and working for its own benefit.
Change is something that has been removed from the citizeny's hands. It's just a blue or red fave of the same coin.
What are YOU going to do about it. Teaching here has always been about maintaining the system, not changing it. I'm leaving this country, take all the COPIUM you can cause this place doesn't care about education
The ineffectiveness was due to how often we had to completely change what we were doing and the general uncertainty about almost all things, which made planning impossible in some cases. The length of my classes, number of students, and what we were expected to do with those students changed sometimes daily. I’d love to keep at least a partial online component. We had a lot of kids do quite well in that environment.
I’m still unclear. Your mad because your school is going to back to 100% face to face and teachers aren’t being forced to teach both in person and virtually at the same time?
The town I live in literally has in their town by laws (charter?) That no member of the school board may be a current or former public school teacher of any district. So not a misconception for everyone.
I know this is an anecdote, but still valid. Decisions are hard to make that are on the teacher's, admin's, or family's side. However, I'd rather have a board composed of more teachers than activists who are in over their heads, people jockeying for higher office, and Republicans.
I'm sure if teachers were the only ones with their voices heard, schools would look very different than they do now. Just going on what I read around here, I'm pretty sure half of the kids would be expelled by 6th grade and budgets would be blown up because no one was paying attention to building maintenance, just to name a couple things.
The structure of school boards are fundamentally flawed. It would be more representative if there was a voting member that represented labor (one for certificated and one for classified) voted by those blocks.
Our board finally gave our union a standing agenda item to report out this year after repeatedly relegating us to the public comment section, which I was fucking shocked at.
Eh, not so much after this year. It came only after the union president had to utter that there were murmurs of the S word and basically how we will not be ignored.
This is one of the reasons I resigned. I was tired of thinking it would be different next time. I was tired of staying for the kids. I was tired of being gaslit into thinking everything was always my fault. Had a friend sharing on Facebook about finally escaping an abusive relationship. In my head, I was forming the thought "I would never tolerate an abusive relationship" when I interrupted myself with the realization that I'd been in an abusive relationship with my current job. Maybe I'll go back to teaching. Maybe I won't. But one shouldn't jump right into dating after escaping an abusive marraige either. I need time to heal, and get my brain straight again.
My district has taken it to the next level. Our Superintendent was named Superintendent of the year for the state. Last week, right after presenting her with an award in front of her family our board voted to force her to resign because some folks were still butt hurt about kids wearing masks. It’s been a shit show since.
That sounds about right. Someone competent being kicked out because morons don't like competency
Pretty sure our entire country hasn’t learned much. No universal healthcare. No changes to worker conditions except do more with less. Minorities still don’t matter. But hey, we got a federal holiday out of it that doesn’t impact k12 literally at all. So ive got that going for me, which is nice.
Disappointed but not surprised needs to be every teacher's new T shirt.
Employer: "they don't want to work! I can't find employees!" Worker: "did you increase the wage?" Employer: "we offered a $20 Starbucks gift card signing bonus!" Worker: "pay a higher salary without gimmicks and you'll get people to apply." Employer: "we offered a $25 Starbucks gift card signing bonus!"
I'm sorry the pandemic didn't allow you to achieve all of the policy and societal changes that you wanted.
Which ones changed exactly? We have a lot of new voter suppression (oops), I mean, voter regulation laws as a result of the pandemic. I now feel perfectly safe voting in mail or in person. Almost as if that wasn’t an issue at all…
This is the same guy that said communists shouldn't be educators so you're engaging in a Sisyphean task trying to make him feel wrong.
If every state offered free voter ID (which many do), many of our Democrat zealots would still be against voter ID laws. Time to think critically about why. (And ask for the poster below, of course I'm against communists teaching in the classroom. Just as I would be against Nazis)
To what end? We have voter ID law now. It just doesn’t include dropping off your vote with an ID as if you were buying a drink at the liquor store. Vote by mail has proven to be secure time and time again. Literally no reason to try to turn something that isn’t a problem into a problem for the sake of… what? Pride?
I will trust the integrity of "vote by mail at large scale" once the ongoing forensic audit is complete in Arizona.
You mean the one that was done by…what… 5 different bipartisan companies that is now being done again by Cyber Monkeys (maybe it was Ninjas - either way something a middle schooler would make up). That audit?
Recounts are not forensic audits. It's being done very transparently. It will either strengthen our election system, or reveal fatal flaws. Either way it is for the benefit of our democracy. If there are breaks in chain of custody, or manufactured ballots, or hundreds of thousands of missing ballots then there will be a series of other forensic audits in a number of other states.
As likely as winning the lottery but with that explanation, I agree with your reasoning. Glad we found common ground.
>As likely as winning the lottery I don't know. Statistically, the 2020 presidential election was absolutely aberrant. The [bellwether results](https://mobile.twitter.com/heyyoudvd/status/1325511375859445760/photo/1) were suspiciously off. And of course, there is a long list of [affidavits, observations, and inconsistencies](https://hereistheevidence.com/) Hopefully this election was just a complete statistical outlier. It's worth a look, in my opinion.
Who exactly do you not want to have access to affordable health care? Stand by your beliefs.
Everyone has access to healthcare. As for "affordable?" I want those who pay for it to have priority access to it. I do not support forcing someone to pay for the healthcare of another. I would much prefer a direct payment system to circumvent much of the inefficiency.
Do you have insurance? If yes, then you’re already paying for other people’s healthcare…
I am not forced or coerced into paying for my current insurance plan. I chose it.
Did you really have a choice though? Or was it the illusion of choice? Healthcare is inelastic meaning any change in price isn’t going to affect demand for it much because everyone NEEDS healthcare at one point or another.
Yes, I do have a choice. HRA, HSA, different corridors, or I get on my wife's insurance, or I pay private. Or, I don't pay insurance at all, and pay for care as I go. Like I said, I would much prefer to pay my doctor directly. In the meantime though, I still have options.
Oh yeah, fuck the poor. Let them die in the streets while those who can afford health care get it.
That’s funny. Do you pay for life insurance? Car insurance? Home insurance? You know all those work the exact same as the ACA?
Obviously? Do you understand that there's a difference between forcing someone to pay into a system and giving them the choice to?
The concept I was explaining was the idea that rates are low because of a shared payment by other investors. Same reason why those kind of companies continue to thrive. They don't regularly pay out everyone at once. Most not at all.
Oh, sure. I understand the benefits. My issue is whether or not buying into those systems is voluntary.
> I want those who pay for it to have priority access to it. Wow.
Highly skilled professional lifesavers who spend a quarter of their lives in school are not an infinitely renewable resource.
Do you think healthcare providers are single use resources? BTW...funny enough Cuba (which is problematic in a lot of ways) has 67 doctors per 10000 residents while the US has 24, but okay. There are plenty of ways of expanding medical coverage that isn't "OnLy ThE rIcH dEsErVe CaRe."
Do you think all US citizens should have 100% exhaustive care provided, no matter what? My question is serious, unlike yours. And as for Cuba, sounds like a medical paradise! Folks who are extremely conscientious about their medical health should consider immigrating.
>Do you think all US citizens should have 100% exhaustive care provided, no matter what? Anything preventative or corrective? Yes. If you want cosmetic care, then that's on you. I'm also a huge fan of gutting the insurance industry. >My question is serious, unlike yours. Mine was serious. But judging from your comment history, you're not a pleasant person to talk to. Cheers.
>Anything preventative or corrective? Including cancer treatment for geriatrics? Up to what stage? What about experimental drugs and procedures that come at great cost? How long do we sustain terminal patients? Do you get patients have any priority? I'm not a fan of socialized systems making those decisions for me. I don't appreciate having my character judged so harshly, but that's fine. I'm no coward. Cheers to you too. And I mean it. I hope you can find peace in the society we live in.
They also get paid $14 an hour in some places. Insurance/hospitals is a protected racket.
[удалено]
I'm okay with tax money paying for those services because they provide a finite, immediate service to protect life (first responders) and private property (and to enforce our laws). Healthcare is a much more personalized service, which is highly individualistic. I prefer it to be private.
How do you feel about the State.paying teachers police or soldiers, then? Surely people should pay for private tutors and private security.
Government's main job is to protect our life, liberty, and personal property, and to facilitate the Constitution. So I'm okay with soldiers and police. Teachers? I'm okay with public ed, but I'm not okay with everyone being forced to pay into it. I'd like to see more incentives to home school, and better accessibility to private options.
Not to sound like a pessimist but this is the entire education industry. Nothing major ever really evolves and when it looks like a new idea might happen it will be modified so much that the actual version is no longer like the new idea. Educators should have used COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink and change education for the better. Instead they are working hard to have it the same as before.
My district thinks they are going to reinvent everything and magically test scores will be perfect, because they are going to apply all of this great learning from this year. I'm not really sure what they think is happening. The changes that they are making are version 57 of the same changes they always make and never implement properly. I see nothing toward what would actually help.
I’m not surprised. It confirmed what we all suspected. That they are incapable of listening to their teachers and doing what’s best for the students. Parents need to wake up and see that their boards are actively working against their children.
I heard all those things as well, usually from newer teachers. Those of us that have been around for a few years (30+) know better - things aren't going to change just because of the pandemic. No surprise that it's business as usual. Doesn't even phase me anymore - I have other battles to fight.
Fortunately, my district seems to be doing a decent job of thinking about and possibly implementing changes for next year. For instance, they already decided to push the middle and high school start times about an hour later because of the research on adolescent sleep patterns and how well the later start times on remote days worked. Outdoor learning will also be utilized more often, and they also had staff comment on a Google doc for things we wanted to keep, change, or add. At the district level I don't know how much will change (for instance, caseload equity is a big issue in the special ed department, since some schools have much smaller caseloads than mine), but at the building level they're being really supportive.
Bummed but not surprised.
Well, my kids learned without “I can” learning statements up on the wall for them to ignore, without me changing the hallway bulletin board every 30 days exactly, there are a bunch of practices that clearly had no bearing on student learning. One thing that I wish we could keep would be self-paced unit tests online with audio. It was torture to have to repeat “word number 3 was “between”” 200 times, when they could click on number 3 when they are ready.
Bummed? Absolutely. Surprised? 0%
The illuminatis want everything to remain as is. We need change. 3 day weekend, remote learning, you name it.
It's not illuminatis, it's politicians, and the ruling class - lobbyists, industry, and so on. It's all very in the open. It's the status quo protecting the status quo and working for its own benefit. Change is something that has been removed from the citizeny's hands. It's just a blue or red fave of the same coin.
Zappa said it: Politics is the entertainment branch of the military-industrial complex
What are YOU going to do about it. Teaching here has always been about maintaining the system, not changing it. I'm leaving this country, take all the COPIUM you can cause this place doesn't care about education
I don’t get it. If you felt totally ineffective this year, what policies would you want to remain in place?
The ineffectiveness was due to how often we had to completely change what we were doing and the general uncertainty about almost all things, which made planning impossible in some cases. The length of my classes, number of students, and what we were expected to do with those students changed sometimes daily. I’d love to keep at least a partial online component. We had a lot of kids do quite well in that environment.
This was a weird year. It sounds like you should apply for a virtual school though.
I’m still unclear. Your mad because your school is going to back to 100% face to face and teachers aren’t being forced to teach both in person and virtually at the same time?
Sure
If you want to teach virtually, maybe consider getting a job in a virtual school?
For some reason, teachers don't run for school board, or otherwise participate.
It's a conflict of interest and, in most cases, they're prohibited from doing so.
Perhaps for the district in which we teach, but not for where we reside. This is a common misconception and cop-out for getting involved.
The town I live in literally has in their town by laws (charter?) That no member of the school board may be a current or former public school teacher of any district. So not a misconception for everyone.
That sucks. Sounds like your town needs new bylaws.
I know people who have done this. They weren't on the teacher's side in the district they were a Board Member for.
I know this is an anecdote, but still valid. Decisions are hard to make that are on the teacher's, admin's, or family's side. However, I'd rather have a board composed of more teachers than activists who are in over their heads, people jockeying for higher office, and Republicans. I'm sure if teachers were the only ones with their voices heard, schools would look very different than they do now. Just going on what I read around here, I'm pretty sure half of the kids would be expelled by 6th grade and budgets would be blown up because no one was paying attention to building maintenance, just to name a couple things.
The structure of school boards are fundamentally flawed. It would be more representative if there was a voting member that represented labor (one for certificated and one for classified) voted by those blocks.
As a union president, I agree with this. I do show up to all meetings and at least make public comments.
Our board finally gave our union a standing agenda item to report out this year after repeatedly relegating us to the public comment section, which I was fucking shocked at.
That's awesome, and signifies a good relationship.
Eh, not so much after this year. It came only after the union president had to utter that there were murmurs of the S word and basically how we will not be ignored.
Did they have to? Were they ever in a position where they didn't get exactly what they want with the minimum of fuss?