Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

Yes­ter­day I wan­dered into a forum that con­tains ran­dom pop­u­la­tion mem­bers from my ex-hometown.  There was a thread about the teacher strike going on in town.  I don’t really self pro­mote by going and say­ing hey read my site here and there around the net, but I did leave a post in the thread stating:

I rarely post here — rarely read it also — but today bore­dom struck  — I agree with the par­ent of this thread — iron­i­cally a few weeks ago I actu­ally wrote on my blog on this sub­ject here: http://creeva.com/2008/07/28/teachers-on-strike-in-my-hometown/

That aside — I’ll be very hap­pen when teach­ing becomes a non-union position.

Though it was in gen­eral to a thread a user named Hom­er­saz­doh wrote this:

Where do you peo­ple get off think­ing all the teach­ers are mem­bers of the peace corp.?  They have every right to try and get more money just like every­one else.  If you’re so con­cerned with the qual­ity of teacher, then you want the best pack­age to draw the best talent.

My next response was:

The prob­lem is under a con­tract sce­nario with unions or large groups of employ­ees you need to pan­der to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor — this means that bet­ter teach­ers are going to make less because the large num­ber of aver­age or below aver­age teach­ers will bring them down.

But I’ve recently had sib­lings go through the ver­mil­ion school sys­tem (some still going, I grad­u­ated in ’94) — over time the qual­ity has only got­ten worse, the edu­ca­tion is not as werll rounded due to block sched­ul­ing, more and more restric­tions on indi­vid­u­al­ity, and the lack of money being poured into the sys­tem that has noth­ing to do with teacher wages.

Oh well, I’ll drop out of this con­ver­sa­tion, my child is prob­a­bly going to be home schooled.

This is what I got from Scott:

Now of course I wasn’t going to let that by, but I excused myself from the thread with this:

Be care­ful — my wife is home schooled — I’m a col­lege fail out/drop out — yet I’m in an extremely com­pet­i­tive white col­lar career.

My child will always be chal­lenged — the com­mon mis­conctp­tion that’s I’ve always fought for pub­lic school­ing is social­iza­tion — I never found it com­pet­i­tive nor strived to be more com­petive — I’m a mem­ber of a few social and group organizations.

BUt believe what you want — and thank you for derail­ing the con­ver­sa­tion any fur­ther — I apol­o­gize to every­one for my detour I helped on this thread — I’ll drop out.

BTW — I don’t care either way the teach­ers strike and union goes –I’m not a ver­mil­ion res­i­dent — I moved out in 2001 — I won’t move back but I have friends and fam­ily there — I’m friends wiht a cou­ple teach­ers there, and I’m a mem­ber of ver­mil­ion com­mu­nity organizations.

Now why did I give you this?  I fig­ured I would give you some back story to what inspired this post.  Xie and I have had many dis­agree­ments about pub­lic schools ver­sus home school­ing, she wasn’t always home­schooled so she has the advan­tage of first hand expe­ri­ence on both sides of the coin.   She is also one of the most intel­li­gent (and quiet) peo­ple I know.   I had a good expe­ri­ence with pub­lic schools, she did not.

How­ever with the ran­dom inspec­tions, school uni­forms, the crush­ing of indi­vid­u­al­ity, and the loss of per­sonal lib­er­ties that kids go through today to “make them bet­ter cit­i­zens” and to “keep them safe”, has made me think twice on send­ing my child to pub­lic schools.   My argu­ment in the past was the social aspect and the abil­ity work with and meet peo­ple.   The com­petivi­ness of school was never a sell­ing point for me.   Heck the overly com­pet­i­tive peo­ple were the ones that made my life hell in school and were the super jocks, the bul­lies that had some­thing to prove, or the grade whores who thought straight A’s would give them the good life when they graduated.

I wasn’t a straight A stu­dent, nor did I try to be.   When I was in ele­men­tary school I was on the honor role and merit role all the time, so what?  My par­ents then changed schools on me and I then almost failed fifth grade.  My wife says I don’t respond well to change and I’m bet­ter with rou­tine.  This is obvi­ous when I went from good grades in a com­pet­i­tive pri­vate school mov­ing to a sub par pub­lic school.  I should have excelled from an aca­d­e­mic per­spec­tive, but I didn’t.   I was a fish out of water.

The same thing hap­pened two years later when we moved to Ver­mil­ion.  At one point my father stated the best thing he could at me to alle­vi­ate my stress and to ease his con­cern of his son fail­ing a grade.  He said that he would be fine if I was a C stu­dent.  This was all I needed to alle­vi­ate the strain.  I high school I only failed two classes, Span­ish 1 and Alge­bra 2.  I did main­tain a C aver­age through­out school.   I was so much a C stu­dent that I grad­u­ated around 100th in a class of 250ish.  This didn’t stop me from going any­where.   I man­aged to get into a good pri­vate col­lege (which I then pro­ceeded to fail out, but that was from lack of want­ing to go to class).

Was I really a C stu­dent?  Not really.  I could have eas­ily made honor roll, I just didn’t like home­work.  I scored in the top 10% in the nation on my ACTs and in the top 1% on my PRE-SATs, I’m sure this helped me to get in col­lege.   I just wanted to take the tests to prove I knew what I was talk­ing about, the busy work held no inter­est for me.  The only com­pe­ti­tion I really par­tic­i­pated in school was who could hit the high­est trum­pet note.

Now I have a good job.   There are arti­cles kick­ing around the Inter­net about why going col­lege is a waste of time and money these days.   I don’t feel I’ve lost out on an edu­ca­tion.  Life is about learn­ing and lov­ing to learn.   To build upon what you have learned already and never stop grow­ing.  Why would I put my child in the bad aspects of that, point­ing out that my child would not be com­pet­i­tive because he may not go to pub­lic school is moronic.   Also when I saw the col­lege vale­dic­to­rian deliv­er­ing piz­zas when I was mak­ing 35k a year 9 years ago made a big impact on me.

I think that tra­di­tional school­ing leads to more social­iza­tion and more social activ­i­ties then tra­di­tional school­ing, how­ever say­ing I need to send my kid to tra­di­tional school­ing for him to remain com­pet­i­tive?  That’s moronic.

Pic­ture from here