VJ, can you explain this please?
You are correct!
Sorry, I am tempted to erase all of this, as I do sometimes when I am ranting. I am so glad to be retired!
I did teach in private schools, but I have many more years in public schools. If you don't think there is a bunch of liberalism all over education, private and public, think again. I know that some private schools are very conservative, but not very many. My principal in public school was a new age hispanic lesbian from northern New Mexico. She and her Hispanic people had been done wrong by us whities forever. All minorities had. We heard about it regularly at faculty meetings and in every aspect of school life. Minorities of all ilk in our program, were favored at every turn. If there was an offense, especially by a minority, it was put in the garbage can. The lies and deception were wide and deep.
Me? I kept my nose to the grind stone and worked long hours. I had a job to do, and I did it to the best of my training and ability. I was working with inner city children whose best chance in life was to get a good education. My students worked hard, because it was expected of them. When they complained about homework, I reminded them that their homework was little in comparison to mine. If they didn't hand in their one page of math facts for homework, they did it at recess. It didn't take a whole bunch of them long to figure out that recess was their favorite part of school.
Several of my former students have been to or are in prison. Some students from our program have died in gang violence.
It was a rough crowd even when they were young. I think of one student, who when he was 5, his grandmother walked him to school in the morning and I could smell alcohol on her then. He did time for participating in a gang rape. He liked to pull down the pants of girls who were going across the monkey bars when he was young, 6 or 7. His consequence then? He got written up by an adult on the playground, and that went into the garbage. He is black, so we couldn't punish him. If the district had known, he would have been suspended for a week. We couldn't have that statistic for our school. If he had been suspended for a week, maybe someone somewhere would have been able to help him see the error of his ways, especially crusty grandma who has lived with his family his whole life.
As a former colleague of mine said, "We worked like dogs." We did. Even though we had a union with a district contract, we were discouraged from being union members and many aspects of the contract were not honored in my building. Years into teaching in this program, one of my colleagues began attending district union meetings and became aware of many aspects of our contracts not being honored. We were supposed to have a 30 minute lunch break. Some years we were expected to lead a group of children during our lunch break to help with the playground problems (fighting). Faculty meeting were supposed to be 40 minutes a week. Ours were usually 2 hours plus, and a portion of that was devoted to brainwashing indoctrination of liberal beliefs--all aspects of insensitivity and wrongdoings by whites and how special every one else was, new age b.s., or whatever appealed to principal.
