{"id":2203,"date":"2008-03-04T05:02:54","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T10:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2203"},"modified":"2008-03-03T16:34:21","modified_gmt":"2008-03-03T21:34:21","slug":"i-knew-early-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2203","title":{"rendered":"Kafka Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a teacher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong.\u00a0 My dad was a high school teacher for four decades, and – as I’ve noted in this space many times – a great one.\u00a0 And for my whole life, he’s evangelized his trade very eloquently.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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<\/strike> 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.<\/p>\n

Still, I’ve seen or heard of nothing quite as Sartreian as this piece from last weekend’s edition of “This\u00a0American Life”<\/a>\u00a0– “Act One”, about the New York Public Schools’ “Rubber Rooms”, places where hundreds of teachers, held on probation for one charge or another.\u00a0 As the blurb notes:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0They call it the Rubber Room. Average length of stay? Months, sometimes years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They get paid full salary as they wait.<\/p>\n

And wait.<\/p>\n

And wait.<\/p>\n

Oh, just\u00a0 listen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Your tax dollars at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a teacher.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong.\u00a0 My dad was a high school teacher for four decades, and – as I’ve noted in this space many times – a great one.\u00a0 And for my whole life, he’s evangelized his trade very eloquently. Of course, by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}