Kafka Lives
By Mitch Berg
I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a teacher.
Don’t get me wrong. My dad was a high school teacher for four decades, and – as I’ve noted in this space many times – a great one. And for my whole life, he’s evangelized his trade very eloquently.
Of course, by the time I was in college the profession had changed quite a bit – and I knew pretty much from the beginning it wasn’t the field for me. I’ve gotten the impression that the teachers’ union has turned it into a blue-collar factory job – like an assembly line, bolting little bits of knowledge onto passing units students – while the education academy has imposed a politically-correct culture on the profession that seems, from my experience as a parent, to stifle thought and teach a one-sided view of pretty much everything with more than one side.
Still, I’ve seen or heard of nothing quite as Sartreian as this piece from last weekend’s edition of “This American Life” – “Act One”, about the New York Public Schools’ “Rubber Rooms”, places where hundreds of teachers, held on probation for one charge or another. As the blurb notes:
Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. When they arrive, they find they’ve been put on some kind of probationary status, and they must report every day until the matter is cleared up. They call it the Rubber Room. Average length of stay? Months, sometimes years.
They get paid full salary as they wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Oh, just listen.
Your tax dollars at work.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
You obviously never worked in a heavily unionized environment before — this is SOP. The UAW has a similar situation but they’re smart enough to make the wait comfortable since there all you have to do is show up every month or so at the union hall to see if the car company might need your service sometime in the next 18 months. If you work in a Civil Service position for the feds it’s more like the Rubber Room, complete with special rooms usually with very bad HVAC systems and desks and chairs from the New Deal. There the idea is to try and bore you to death to get you to go away, or to try and trip you up on something in the meantime.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
“Average length of stay? Months, sometimes years.”
An average can’t be this, sometimes that. So how accurate is the program?