Teachers Unions explained.....

[srkruzich]

As for the  "it's for the children" bit. In what other profession is a person expected to put part of their paycheck each month back into their job?  Some "treats" are given freely of course, but being expected to pay for kids lunches, pencils, extra project supplies and the things that make a teaching unit work is extortion, but teachers do it ....for the kids. Teachers are the ultimate scroungers; they have to be. Teachers can make things for units with almost nothing, and do...for the kids.

No one expects teachers to do this!  WHy is a teacher buying lunch?  the lunch is free most of the time and IF the student doesn't qualify for free, then where did they spend their lunch money.  (Candy store maybe?)    Soda and chip machines?   Thats not your or my problem.  That is the kids problem if they make such a bad choice.  IF Their parents don't give em lunch money, then make a lunch to bring with them.  OBVIOUSLY they have food at the house!  

Again, what yall are doing by using your money to do this, is enabling sorry ass parents or kids who make poor choices to keep on doing what they are doing.   The children won't starve without a lunch.  I promise!   I do quite well without a lunch even today.   On those kids that supposedly don't have food at home, thats why they get free lunchs cause they don't have food at home.  

IF any kid comes to school more than 2 times without money, then i would be calling their parents finding out if they sent them to school with money or a lunch.  I sure wouldn't be financing anyones lunch's or supplies.

[Catwoman]

And that would be the reason you're not an educator, Steve.  Kids are totally at the mercy of the adults around them.  When the parents in question are spending their money on booze, cigarettes, or other vices, instead of buying the children food, clothing, or school supplies, then someone has to step up and help the kids...Period.  The kiddos have a need for at least a basic amount of care...When the parents can't or won't do it...The the school/the teacher step up.  Is it right that the teacher should have to do that?  No.  But if the teacher is worth their salt, they're doing it anyway.  That's just the way teaching goes.  Up to the point where I took my present position, I always worked for poorer systems and regularly put in around 3k a year into my room, due to the school's inability to give me a workable stipend that would cover the extras that made my curriculum come alive for the kids.  Now, I teach for a large system that can afford to give me a workable stipend and I am not having to put as much in to make my room do what it should for the kids.

[Warph]

Ah, come on guys... teachers are people, too.  Here is a good example of
what the normal teacher goes through on a daily basis:

[Catwoman]

OMG...LOL...It looks like someone who actually taught was the one who made that cartoon!!! lol  Thanks for this, Warph...Loved it!!! 

[Diane Amberg]

Yup! Thanks.

[kshillbillys]

Mail carriers may not be required to go to "classes" but we have training talks every day. We are always being told new things and new expectations and do have several training sessions throughout the year. It is, after all, an everchanging world out there! And yes, we do have to pay for a lot of thing out of pocket, such as uniforms and other things for work, plus some of us do carry dog treats and candy in our bags, that we pay for.

In fact, I believe that a lot of people will tell you that they pay for a lot of things out of their own pocket, no matter what job they do. Just my opinion ---- Jennifer

[Catwoman]

I can believe you carry dog treats! lol...I wouldn't want your job, Jennifer...Having done loads of home visits, I can attest to the family dog(s) being a scary prospect.

[kshillbillys]

Well, we aren't supposed to...but sometimes it makes it a lot easier...along with the pepper spray to spray those dogs with and some of the guys even carry rocks or bricks in their's to bean those poor dogs upside the head if they come at them! It's a fun job actually and I've made friends with lots of dogs and have even had a few that would walk with me on loops like they were being protective. I wouldn't trade my job for anything, except maybe winning the lottery so I didn't have to work in the winter! lol

[Warph]

This post is probably a little long but here goes.  I have read about the problems of the Teacher Unions in the urban areas of some of our larger cities... more problems than solutions.... which led me to think about the blacks of the urban slums.  What are the T.U.'s doing about the race problems in our schools today.  It's a little more complicated here in AZ, I think, with hispanic children who speak very little english.... but that's another story. 

Let us Imagine a black school-kid of sixteen in, lets say, Detroit.  He can't read or, if he can, it's barely.  He has never read a book, and never will.  He doesn't know where England is, or Africa, or different States of the U.S.  His mental world is small beyond the imagining of the literate.  He has no grasp of government, and has never heard of any author.  He cannot do simple arithmetic.  He has perhaps never seen a checkbook, and will never have one.  He doesn't watch the news.  If he did, he would not understand what he was seeing.  Ideas like the stockmarket, exchange rate, and United Nations are utterly beyond him.

I am not being cruel.  I am describing a condition, the normal, usual, unexceptional condition of American blacks going to school in large urban slums.

Of history, the kid knows only that blacks were enslaved by whites.  He cannot approximate the dates of the Civil War.... as neither, astoundingly, can many white "college graduates"... and cannot name a single country in Africa, but he knows that blacks were stolen from their homes and very badly treated.

He has in all likelihood never been out of Detroit, or perhaps his neighborhood.  He has no contact with the larger society except through the police and television, where he sees whites leading glamorous lives in a wide world beyond his grasp.  He would be very uncomfortable in a small town in white America, having less familiarity with the culture that would an American in a small town in Italy.  Further, he speaks something so far from standard English that he would have difficulty talking to most whites.

He doesn't have a part-job after school or, if he does, it will be of a very low level with no future that he can see.  There is a reason why cash-register keys in fast-food chutes have pictures of hamburgers and milk shakes instead of words, why the registers make change automatically.  The kid in Detroit can't make change.  Little commercial demand exists for the illiterate and innumerate who have very bad attitudes.

Which the kid has.  He hates whites, whom he blames for all of his troubles and inadequacies.  He hates Asians, who excel in school.  It is an ugly hatred on a hair trigger and explodes readily in savage violence.  The media play this down, hard, but what you pretend doesn't exist..... still does.

The school-kid from Detroit has no loyalty at all to the United States.  Why would he?  It is a white country, and he hates whites.  He doesn't know who fought in World War Two, or when it took place, but he knows that whites enslaved blacks, and that he is on the bottom of things.  He blames whites.  "Country" is too large an abstraction for him.

Now, intellectuals and quasis of the salon classes, few of whom have the slightest familiarity with kids from Detroit, prattle of oppression and opportunity and social this and social that, and blame blacks, or whites, or God, or sunspots... but chiefly, each other.

Racial discourse in America usually consists of liberals and conservatives battling each other, neither having much interest in blacks.  Both offer solutions of which the kid is perfectly incapable.  Liberals believe that with enough federal uplift and and warm-and-fuzziness he will have better self-esteem and begin to study and prosper... which for a variety of reasons he hasn't, isn't, and won't.  Conservatives think that if he only worked hard and read the Founding Fathers, he would rise like Rockefeller, which he can't and won't.

I think of the riots that we have then in England and the US that are large concentrations of young black people... most school age kids.... who do not share the values of Caucasian civilization.  This matters.  I always thought society's accepted values, not its laws, determine its behavior.  When the tidal waves wrecked Japan, how many mobs of looters attacked the unguarded shopping centers?  For the mathematically advanced reader, I will offer a hint: It is a non-negative integer less than one.  Years back, I wandered the side streets of Tokyo after midnight, without fear, and saw dating couples doing the same thing.  The Japanese do not refrain from violent criminality because the police watch them, but because they agree that they do not want a violently criminal society.  They haven't time for that kind of crap.  They are too busy working and talking care of their familys and elders.

Charles Krauthamer's comment:  "The blacks of the festering, simmering slums clearly do not share the values of European whites, and will loot when they can get away with it.  I might also if I saw the surrounding country as my enemy.  The difference between the looting in England and that in the US seems to be that in London it was more a matter of stealing electronics, whereas in the US it involves much more of racial hatred.  Where does this lead?  What do we do?  The approach both tacitly accepted and firmly enforced has been one of bread and circuses, or rather welfare and television, to keep the lid on in the "inner city," as we say; this, accompanied by heavy pressure from government and salon not to notice what is happening.  It was perhaps the best response.... best for whites, anyway.  It left the slums hopeless, depraved, but quiescent.  Affirmative action kept the pressure down, and smart, ambitious blacks were admitted in small numbers to the salons and became superstars, like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton.  This kept them from becoming real revolutionaries. The blacks of the slums stayed chiefly in the slums and, while welfare produced a terrible dependency, all of these measures ensured a static, artificial calm."  

But now bankruptcy looms, and Congress threatens to cut social spending to pay for the wars.  There is no longer enough money in a divided nation to buy everyone off.  Whites will not revolt, not violently, but blacks will.  I don't think the faculty lounges understand how much anger there is among whites.  I'm sorry, Al Sharpeton, but it is not just twelve louts in the KKK and a few militias in Idaho that are very pissed at blacks.  It is pretty much the blue-collar world, the cops, the firemen, and most (I really think) a whole lot of journalists who keep their mouths carefully shut.

This is not good.  Not good at all.  Cat and Diane, looking at this with a Teachers' perspective on the Kid from Detroit.... WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

.....Warph

[sixdogsmom]

Good post Warph, what do you think the answer might be?