There have always been awful teachers. I have a friend who's a veteran high school English teacher. Some years ago I remember him talking about a woman in his department they were trying to get rid of because she wasn't teaching English, she was teaching flower arrangement. Which is kind of a neat thing to learn, but not her job.
There are individual bad teachers, though, and then there is a collective movement toward bad education. In what at least used to be the normal course of events, teachers might slag off work to pursue their own agenda, but it would just be single teachers doing their own thing. And that thing might just be laziness. The Internet and social media allowed untold thousands in cities across the nation to coordinate their efforts such as they are, and it's given them a flag to sail under.
Much of what the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter did was to show what kind of agenda so many teachers had in common. And if they weren't doing their jobs, what is it they were dong? They were planning together and showing off for each other in a way that would not have been imaginable before Web 2.0. But that meant leaving evidence out in the open where Libs of TikTok could find it. Live by the tech, die by the tech.
Not surprisingly, when the Washington Post took sides on this matter it was on the side of the politicized teachers. But that paper can't settle the argument.
2 comments:
Teaching flower arranging rather than the subject on the curriculum really should have lead to the teacher being let go. Maybe she'd have be happier working at a florist's shop. Maybe that's where she is now - either that or perhaps she's got thousands of flower arranging wannabes watching her youtube channel.
While it's a fact there have always been a few bad teachers it's also true that there are boundaries they should not cross. There's been talk of a mental health crisis in the US, a crisis I believe goes further than one particular country. Here in what's called the post-industrial West, we have a socially broken society that's alienated from the kind of normal interactions healthy for human beings.
The odd thing is that there are people who don't actually relate to infrastructure; not only do they think that sidewalks, bridges, plumbing and electricity were always here, they also have no idea that the first computers were built and programmed by people not all that long ago. The generations younger than yours (frequently the college educated) often have no idea of a 'before' when the magic technology they take for granted had wires, knobs and antennae. Far too many are living in the matrix and don’t really know any different. The wizard behind the curtain wants to make them crazy, and is succeeding.
I haven't watched much of Libs of TikTok. Adults can behave however they want with each other but, if there really are teachers actively promoting gender dysphoria to children, they should be fired. Having a flag to sail under has nothing to do with the risky condition of the ship.
Oh yeah, she definitely should have been let go at that point, assuming she had ever been a defensible hire in the first place. Unions make it harder to fire teachers--a good thing in itself, since it protects them from vindictive dismissals, but maybe some take advantage of it. Plus there are some assignments that it's hard to fill. I do like your other suggestions for how she could make a living.
In Western society we were already becoming alienated and atomized. Government and media decided to deliberately make the problem worse. If anything is unforgivable that is, especially in the ways that it too affects children. Even with the lockdowns mostly over--at least for now--there's still no priority on healing those rifts.
Mine may be the last generation to remember when telephones had rotary dials, and when cable TV was a wondrous and threatening innovation instead of a relic that more and more people are actively getting rid of. Does this matter? Perhaps. Like you say, many people look right past pieces of infrastructure like bridges, electricity, etc. They may not be aware of the distinction between nature and culture. And this lack of awareness may prevent them from seeing that one of them is much more easily manipulated than the other.
Libs of TikTok is something I only became aware of second hand, and I still don't watch these videos very often. Not the least because some of them could cause me actual physical pain. I don't know how typical or representative these teachers are. But the fact that they lecture others on social media shows that this kind of behavior is seen as an ideal by too many. As the old Latin phrase goes, the corruption of the best is the worst.
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