Teacher, Teacher

Barry:

Let's also remember that after parents, the biggest impact on a child's success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom. In South Korea, teachers are known as "nation builders." Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.

Like everyone else, I was excited to hear Obama make the statement that it's time to actually make teaching in America a more worthy profession, therein presumably getting the best and the brightest to become teachers thanks to higher status and salary.

But of course, this is probably the same shit they say every year in the SOTU. And then nothing changes. As I said five years ago, it's never gonna change until we remove the stigma of it being an old lady job, and actually make it a competetive, higher-paying one.

...we tell ourselves, teaching is a higher calling, teachers do it cause they love it! They’d do it for free; they’re thrilled to be getting anything! Meanwhile we pay janitors at these schools twice as much – I guess we think of janitors as being an ambitious, money-hungry conniving bunch, so it’s okay to pay them. We expect them to [teach] for almost nothing cause that’s the way it always has been (ie has historically been a woman’s job), and then we wonder why we’re getting dumber and dumber every year. It’s not that Johnny can’t read - it’s that instead of becoming teachers, the people who COULD teach Johnny to read took the job of placing those cakes in the urinals since it pays more and you get pissed on less.

Hey, don't be too tough on Obama for only being 5 years behind Xmastime. He's only human.