I can’t tell you how much I hate school!!!!
I used to get up (or come in after a nice run in the woods), hit the
books or computer, do a few assignments before breakfast, then finish the rest
after I ate. I’d be done before noon
(sometimes before 10!), and have the rest of the day to read, listen to music,
help with dinner, take a walk, watch a DVD, or nap, if I’d been out running
that morning. I didn’t mind keeping up
with my studies in the summer, because Aunt Lina allowed me to pursue any topic
I wanted until I felt I’d exhausted my interest.
That’s how my research on mummies morphed into learning about
archeology, mythology and folktales of foreign lands. My fascination with one shell I picked up on
a visit to Wildwood, when I was seven, lead me to learning all about univalves,
bivalves, mollusks, shore life and the importance of water systems. Every time I found something interesting, I
looked up more about it.
Then the move to New Jersey and this go-to-public-school routine…
Suddenly I have a full day, every day, with mandatory schedules that
allow me no time to do things that really matter to my life! I have idiot teachers that make reading,
writing, and learning the most boring, time-sapping task. They don’t like it when I already know the
material, especially if I know more about it than they do.
Let me give you a prime example :The “Aye Aye” dynasty of Russia (as I
like to call it).
We were learning about Russia in Social Studies, and how there was
“this revolution” as the teacher called it, where they took the Tsar out of
power. The teacher, Mrs. Raschall,
talked about Tsar Nicholas, and asked the class a question about him. Of course, no one’s hand went up. So after twenty seconds, I raised mine and
answered her question, referring to the Tsar as Nicholas Romanov. The teacher said I was wrong.
HUH??
She said I was wrong because it was Nicholas “Aye Aye,” not Nicholas Romanov.
She even pointed it out in the book and
had the nerve to ask me if I’d read my Social Studies book. I swear this is true – ask anyone in my
class. Ruby did a face-palm
gesture. Carl was laughing so hard he
had his elbow across his face, to make like he was coughing! I tried to explain that Nicholas the
second and Nicholas Romanov were the same guy. She couldn’t believe it & asked me how I
knew that. After all, it wasn’t in the
book.
Louise, one of the quietest girls in the grade, came to my defense.
“Did you ever see the movie ‘Anastasia’? It begins with the Russian Revolution! And it’s all about the Romanov dynasty.”
Mrs. Raschall still insisted on calling him Nicholas “Aye Aye”. Thank God she teaches Social Studies and not
Shakespeare! Imagine learning about Richard
“Aye Aye Aye”. It’s a fine
example of NJ tax dollars at work -- a teacher who is barely literate.
It scares me --the cost-per-pupil in NJ is one of the highest in the
country, and there will be kids graduating without the basic knowledge of how
to pronounce Roman numerals after a name.
A kid like that could become your boss someday! I’d sure hate to work for someone who was
dumber than me!
I told Aunt Lina about Mrs. Raschall and the “aye aye” incident, &
she discussed it with a neighbor, Amy Coddington, whose daughter, Daphne, is a
freshman at White
Cedars High School. There was a similar
problem at the High School last week. Apparently the stupidity isn’t only
limited to teachers at the D.S.W. Middle School.
It seems that freshman students at WCHS have to take a class called Freshman
Community Skills, where they learn basic internet proficiency, financial
literacy, how to fill in a job application and how to research a given
topic. According to Daphne, the kids
call the class “Freshskills” (because it sounds like Freshkills, a former NY
trash dump, & the class, like the old dump, stinks!). Well, the other day in “Freshskills” the
teacher told the class that in less than 10 years, all of them would probably
need to apply for some form of insurance. Her assignment was to use the
computer to get some sort of insurance quote.
Sounds simple, right?
Daphne decided to look into car insurance. The problem was that she had no car
(yet). The teacher told her to pretend
she was insuring her Dad’s car, go on the computer & get a quote. Daphne hesitated. They were asking for the type of information
that the teacher, in an earlier lesson, had told them NOT to give out. Like her date-of-birth….driver’s license
number (which she didn’t have anyway)….phone number and address…..but an
assignment is an assignment, so she went ahead, filling in a phony license
number & birth date. Apparently she
wasn’t the only one who figured that such a tactic would fulfill the
assignment.
The result? More than half the
freshman class was getting phone calls and e-mails that night from insurance
salespeople, who were thinking of them as possible clients! Daphne was called twice after school, and
once after dinner; she kept telling the guy that it had been a classroom
assignment, but he didn’t believe her.
On the fourth attempt, Amy Coddington handed the phone to her husband,
who cursed at the guy and hung up.
Stuff like this was going on all across town, because the teacher hadn’t
fully thought out the consequences of her assignment. And this teacher’s supposed to be showing
kids how to avoid making stupid mistakes while using a computer, right?
Why am I wasting my life trapped with idiots?
That’s not to say that all teachers are idiots. I was at a college graduation party this past
weekend, where I met a young teacher named Zara who obviously cared deeply for
her first graders. She teaches in
Connecticut, and talked about how she adores her class, even the most
rambunctious of them, and how hard it was when she sees some kids struggle to
understand the lessons. It just makes
her look at other ways of approaching the lesson, like using pennies to teach
math. But even she had a bad
teacher story!
She told some of the adults at the party (I just happened to listen in)
about a student-teacher whose reason for becoming a teacher was simply to “have
the same hours as my kids, and the same days off.” It galled Zara that this woman seemed to
think that papers graded themselves and lesson plans magically appeared from
thin air! And the student-teacher even
called the regular classroom teacher, who was supposed to grade her efforts,
and gave the real teacher an argument because she didn’t exactly write her a
glowing recommendation!
It’s sad that the bad teachers are so bad that they overshadow
the good ones. But it’s like that with
everything, I suppose. If something good
happens, you may tell ten, twenty or even thirty people. But if something bad happens, you’ll complain
about it to everyone you meet, even strangers.
Looking at what I’ve written, I guess that I’m a prime example of
that! I’ve just complained about 3 bad
teachers, to the wide world of the interwebs.
But what else can be done?
Aunt Lina asked Zara what, if anything, she would recommend that she do
as my guardian, because this teacher is obviously lees than qualified. And Sara said that if my Social Studies
teacher isn’t tenured (and she isn’t – it’s her first year), to tell the
administrators or the board about her BEFORE she makes that tenured
status.
Otherwise, White Cedars will be stuck with this teacher until she decides
to retire. Yes, stuck with an educator who can’t
pronounce Roman numerals properly. But
after all, it’s not as if she teaches Math or anything….
Aye aye aye!!!! (And I
don’t mean three!)
Until my next
post…..
Randi
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