The Things We Teachers Carry

My thoughts on teachers and guns are in today's Knoxville News Sentinel.

Why I support the DREAM Act

An illegal education

Students' Opinions of Teachers

As a fourth year teacher, I've learned to be thick-skinned.

My job as a high school Spanish teacher is to prepare my students for college Spanish classes. (According to the state of Tennessee, that will change for current 8th graders.) So I don't really care if Spanish word order makes students mad or if they think Latin American geography is pointless. I present the material in a variety of ways that will help students learn. If students study, my class and those of my colleagues are not that difficult.

I take most of the complaining with a grain of salt. A certain amount of whining is to be expected from teenagers. I didn't love every assignment I was given in high school, and I would complain if I had to take Geometry right now. No one likes to hear this when they're doing something they don't like, but I believe that sometimes you have to do things you don't like is a good piece of advice for the real world. I didn't like college biology or anthropology, but I like that college degree they helped me earn.

I read Tuesday's Knoxville News Sentinel. I usually read it online, but I got a "real" paper on Tuesday. The KNS has recently reformatted the paper. Their weekly teen feature, Text Me, moved to the back of the section where it used to be, and they turned the front page of the section into School Matters. The headline of school matters caught my eye. So it made me curious about what they would run in Text Me to compliment that. (The format of the Text Me section is confusing, but worth a read.)

I'm really not surprised by teenagers much, but their responses shocked me. As a teacher, I am well aware of respect issues between teachers and teens, but I didn't know trust was such an issue.

Do you think teachers/administrators with a proper permit should be allowed to carry a gun to school? Why?
No, it's just doesn't sound safe to me. Some teachers might go crazy or something.
No, they could get mad and do something bad.
Absolutely not. If teachers carry guns, what is to prevent students from bringing them to school? And the fact that a teacher that doesn't like you may be carrying a gun is not a comforting thought.

Is this what students think about their teachers, or is this random sampling full of suspicious people? Do students worry about crazy teachers out to get them? While there are the Erin McLeans out there who disgrace all teachers, is there a reason students have this opinion of the average teacher?

What do real teens think?

Social Studies Education, Please

The current trend in education is an obsession with math and science. I call it an obsession rather than a focus because that is all teachers hear about. We have to raise achievement in those areas so that our students can compete with those from China and Japan. (I AM not going to let myself get started on that.)

I am well aware of the fact that most people consider all Latinos to be "illegal Mexicans from Guatemala and Honduras" as repeated in one of my favorite movies, A Day Without a Mexican.
I guess I really hadn't thought about it, but I learned a new stereotype tonight.

I was in line at a local gas station where I witnessed the following scene:
Clerk: Lays cigarettes down on counter and tells Bubba the total.
Bubba: Wow, 'at's a lot cheaper than them A-rabs.
Clerk: Which A-rabs?
Bubba: Those down the road there.
Clerk: Rolls his eyes and shakes his head. They gotta charge that so they can make money to send home.

Sometimes I just have to keep my mouth shut because a fight, verbal or otherwise, in a gas station is a no-win situation, no matter how correct I am. It wasn't the totally ignorant reference to A-rabs that bothered me so much, or the way that so many people think "furners" come here just to send money home.

Those "A-rabs" aren't really Arabs at all. The owners of the gas station down the road are Indian. I didn't want to explain the difference in Native American Indians and Indians from India, the country. Next time, I'll drive on down the road to them when I need gas.

This is why politicians like Dick Cheney make stupid remarks about Appalachia and big, fancy city folk make tv shows like Outsider's Inn. I live in Sevier County, Tennessee, which prides itself on being a prime tourist destination. If a tourist had been standing in line behind me today, I do not think they would have left with a very positive opinion of Dolly Parton's hometown.

I was in a local bookstore over the weekend and I looked at Ann Coulter's Guilty: Liberal . I don't agree with Ann on much, but I think she hit the nail on the head on one topic. On the book jacket, there is an excerpt in which she states that 7th graders know more about putting a condom on a banana than they do geography. I totally agree.