A culture of copy-and-paste

Lis says:

Re:Thinking critically
Daily I thank God that I went to private schools where a free excahge of ideas was not only tolerated but encouraged. I wasn’t fed facts, I learned.

And daily I thank God that I attended a good school system that taught me how to think, and that encouraged students to bring in their knowledge from outside the classroom–and that taught polite and usually-effective strategies for saying, “that’s wrong, the correct answer is this.” Sometimes (especially with the best teachers), the flow of discussion in the classroom would let a student easily do it during the discussion. Other times, not so much–because, strangely, teachers react almost as if they were real, normal, human beings, which is to say they react badly to being publicly corrected in a way that makes them look or feel stupid. In those situations, I found that going to the teacher after class with good information almost always resulted in a (credited) correction the next day in class.

But, sadly, you can only feel pity for me, because that excellent school system I attended was a public school system, with teachers who were members of the NEA, and therefore, obviously substandard, no matter what I experienced in the classroom, and later when I attended college and found that my classmates from the snootier schools had not learned by high school graduation things that I’d learned by eighth grade graduation.

Lis says:

Re:A flaw in your logic
In what way do I seem “bitter” about having received a good education? What torques me off is people who blather on about the NEA being Bad, Bad, Bad, and therefore NEA-member teachers being Bad, Bad, Bad.

In case you’ve forgotten, what you said was:
Well you can blame the various Colleges of Education and the NEA for producing substandard teachers and providing them the protections of union membership.

What you’ve maybe also forgotten, or perhaps never knew, is that the teacher colleges were a response to the determination to provide at least basic literacy and numeracy to the entire population, and that the current protections in teachers’ union contracts are a response to the abuses that preceeded the union contracts.

Quite a few of those very good teachers my sister and I had wouldn’t have survived in teaching, absent strong union protections. One was a professional gambler, who also refused to use the official textbook. (He wrote his own, not for publication but for use in class.) One quietly but apparently sincerely believed he was Superman, although he never put this to the test in any of the critical ways. Another was more openly crazy, given to occasional strange outbursts in class. Two of them were, hey, let’s be polite and say “politically radical.” My chemistry teacher did a number of things that were highly educational, but which I recognize in retrospect to have been rather dangerous. He also from time to time railed against the idiocy of the oil company he had worked for before they closed down their local facility.

Characters like that wouldn’t have survived without a union. Sadly, today, even with the union, they probably wouldn’t survive. With today’s prudery and censoriousness, all their strangeness would be considered solid, unassailable grounds for dismissal for cause.

It’s not the union contracts that are responsible for substandard teachers. It’s the intersection of women having more options, an unwillingness to pay enough to attract what’s no longer effectively a captive supply of teachers, and a public culture so strait-laced it would give the Victorians breathing problems.

Lis says:

Re:A flaw in your logic
Sneer at my crazy teachers all you want; I got a good education, from the crazy ones as well as the professional gambler, the political radicals, the guy who also owned the city’s biggest jewelry shop. They knew their subjects and they wanted to teach, and as long as they did turn out students who learned, no one bugged them about extraneous trivia.

When I got to college, I found that quite a few of my more “privileged” classmates, who attended either private schools or else public schools in wealthier communities, with far more decorous teachers, were stymied by simple tasks like identifying the countries on a blank map of Europe–or even North America; never mind asking them how geography contributed to the differences in development between Europe and China. And it wasn’t that they were stupid; they learned quickly, once somebody started asking them to learn and think about things like the political effects of geography. (Or any number of other things; there seemed to have been an awful lot of rote learning and relatively little thinking going on in some of those spiffy suburban schools, whether public or private.)

It’s not the ’40s, or the ’30s, or the ’20s, in terms of working conditions, because of the unions you despise. And if you think those days would stay gone if unions were totally banished from our lives, there’s a chicken factory in North Carolina you ought to check out. Incidents like that are relatively rare these days, because of all the “intrusive” regulations pushed for by labor unions, as well as the dreaded Union Work Rules. Even with the laws, the regulations, and the rules in place, companies still cut corners and take chances when they think they can get away with it, and if we kill both the bargaining power and the political power of the workers, those rules and regulations will be swept away until the next time the death count mounts high enough to galvanize people into action.

By the way, did you notice the latest report of “finger food”–the one that’s real, not the previous fraud attempt? Worker had his finger tip sliced off by the soft-serve machine’s rotars, but nobody thought to shut down the machine or warn the workers at the front of the shop. And it was the second lost-finger incident at this store. Just the kind of guys we want serving food to the public without the occasional outside inspection! (Wendy’s, OTOH, did shut down production facilities and start an immediate and thorough investigation, after the first, fake, “finger food” report. Do we really want responsible companies like Wendy’s operating at a cost disadvantage compared to corner-cutters like Kohl’s?)