I had a few teachers like him in high school and they were the best. What I mean is, they were stuck somewhere due to austerity measures.
One of them was an Algebra and Geometry teacher who had previously taught at universities for over 20 years prior to ending up in high school. He was only there due to the university he previously taught at, having their budget lowered. He was one of the best teachers I had, mostly cause of the fact he actually cared about the students he had and easily recognized that the public school system he was now teaching in, was not set up for success. "You are all being robbed of a proper education", he used to say this often and he meant it, and he once made comments about how 9/11 seemed to make this country lose it's minds, in reference to all the security measures at our school. What made him special as a teacher though was that he could see why his students were struggling, and it had to do with the bad education we had been brought up in from the public school system.
The other was a Language Arts and History teacher I had, who had been teaching for over 40 years and she had previously been involved in civil rights in Alabama, and was proud of this. She was black and the most far left teacher I ever had. She had a similar transition to teaching high school, cause previously she was an elementary teacher and due to budget cuts on to the public schools in our area, she found her way in a high school teaching History and Language Arts. Her history class was the best. She absolutely hated the American government, and used to give us speeches about "Uncle Sam" as she referred to the US military, often making reference to how our school was like a prison with armed security guards and the "zero tolerance" policies we had. I loved that woman and when she passed of cancer in my sophomore year, that was one of the first deaths of someone in my life that had a real effect on me. Her biggest deal though was how the school system set up here cared more about the private schools and charter schools than they did the public ones, and she would say it in her own words "they don't care about you in the public schools cause you're poor. If your parents were sending you to a private school, you would have brand new text books."
Both of these teachers I had used to publicly rant about how our schools were being defunded and that we weren't getting a good education. My History teacher used to tell us about the class war and how once we got out of high school, we would be in for a rude awakening with how the world works. She fought the school system up to her death. All of this was quite radicalizing for me, as this was also in the 2000s at the height of the Bush years and Iraq war. The schools I went to had bloated budgets on security and were run like prisons, yet we had old text books (my middle school literally had books going back to the 90s) and stuff was falling apart at our school, yet they had the money to blow on security cameras and a program to send police straight to the school. Later on, when I read about the school to prison pipeline, I could relate to all of that cause I went through it.
I feel like the video for Rammstein's "Links 2, 3, 4" gets the same idea across, too.
Entomology and Ideology is gonna be a real class once STS becomes an undergrad department
