Kids are hardwired to love learning, they will never stop asking questions and exploring the world.
Schools quash that curious spirit. They put kids in a boring, prison-like, highly regimented environment that seeks to teach discipline and obedience to the status quo. Don't think, accept your role in the capitalist machine. If you are bullied, no one will help you, but if you fail to complete work you will be punished. Most of all, get used to not owning most of your time.
Take note of this and try to rekindle your child-like curiousity and love of learning. Ask yourself, do you still have questions about the universe you forgot to ask as a child? Read about the planets, the stars, microbes, machines. But most importantly, do it at your own pace and do it because you still have questions. Not to pass some test, but for you.
I'm no hero. Just doing my job.
Same. Let me know when the revolution comes and you start executing people for teaching kids how to read
Have you seen America's literacy rate? Don't pin your pride on that claim.
I’m well aware of the literacy rate. I’m fighting it every fucking day. I do reading intervention. It is my only subject and I work at it 10 hours a day. And I also have union duties and do org work on top of that. It’s not my fault that kids come into 2nd grade with more severe trauma than the average adult. It’s not my fault that a bunch of racist housing policies made my district dirt poor or that 10% of my students are housing unstable. But I have hard data to prove that what I do works.
Kids come in functionally illiterate and are often caught up to their peers by the end of the intervention. I chose to work in a poorer district with higher need kids for lower pay because their union is more radical and because I have more leeway here to not propagandize children. Guess that’s equivalent to beating unarmed protestors or shooting black kids dead in the street daily though.
Nah, you get a pass. However you are unuseually dedicated and unuseually good.
Back in the school district I worked in we didn't have a lot of people like you and it showed. If we had had more like you, I might have followed through with finishing my education as a young man.
Yeah some districts are bootlicker central. There were several points where that sort of deference to the bureaucracy made me consider swapping lanes. There’s a sweet spot for me where a district isn’t performing so poorly that it’s about to be taken over by the state but it’s underserved enough that it’s kind of an “emperor is far away” situation
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