To "Parent"
To the commenter who posted on my "I hate my job" post from back in May:
I accidentally deleted your comment (I'm watching the Home Run Derby and was distracted by Berkman's second at bat), but I read it and would like to reply to it.
This general idea behind the comment was that this parent was glad that I wasn't a teacher anymore because I'm a loser who couldn't get a real job and who had no self-confidence. I actually think the real reasoning they were saying that was because of my excitement and pure jubilation of my teaching career coming to an end in May.
Well if you had to put up with the kids I did in the situation I did, you might feel a little different. I actually started the year out quite excited about the opportunity, but as the year went on that changed drastically. Putting up with kids who had no respect for their peers, their teachers, and in many cases themselves. The majority of them put out zero effort towards my class or any of their other classes. They chose to ignore lectures and examples. Then when it was time to do the work, half wouldn't care enough to try and the other half would expect me to do it for them. Then several weeks later during a project they would expect me to show them one on one what they missed while they were playing solitaire over the last month.
A surprising number of high school kids these days just don't care. They're so used to teachers letting them slide that they're no longer capable of taking responsibility for themselves. Accountability no longer exists in our education system.
Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of great kids too. It was a pleasure to work with the kids that had the desire to learn. It wasn't even about intelligence level, if a kid wanted to learn I enjoyed teaching them. Some of the kids were gifted, I gave them an assignment and just turned them loose. Others needed frequent assistance, but they worked hard and followed along with lessons.
If you're a genuinely concerned parent who has raised their children right then you've got no need to worry. They'll be in even better shape than they would've been just a few years ago. They'll be working harder than they're classmates and teachers will love to have them in class.
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments | Add yours
Comments
2 David Holcomb said...
I have to agree with Mr. Behrend, there were a lot of us that acted like jerks in class just for the negative attention. I myself was one of them. There's no wondering why he would hate his job, I don't blame him at all. When you have kids that constantly talk, or come in 30 minutes late with their lunch tray in their hands, don't ever do any work at all (or they wait until the LAST week of school to start doing work), you tend to become aggrivated. I could see the 'wanting to quit' look in him in the second semester.
Mr. Behrend could have written us all up and sent us to the office, or made life hell with 200,000 pages of homework every night as punishment. But he didn't. He helped the kids that wanted help, and those who didn't do any work simply failed.
He was also there just about every morning for us if we needed extra help. Overall, he was a "cool" teacher, but most kids weren't smart enough to realize that because they can't even spell HTML (which is their fault because they didn't pay attention in class). He has the right to post that he 'hates his job' or whatever he wants, because he could have made things much, much harder us. Let the man vent.
Posted on July 13, 2004 at 04:12 PM
3 Brian said...
Thanks for the support David. Nice to see you hanging around and reading my site, I guess if you're inside on the Internet you can't be getting in TOO much trouble.
Are you still building sites? Let me know how it's coming and if you ever need any help.
Posted on July 13, 2004 at 04:49 PM
1 Jessica said...
ya... look at our AP class... *cough* ;)
Posted on July 13, 2004 at 12:10 PM