Surely Skoolz Is Brokin would be the correct headline. Dunt you know nuffink? PS Was going to (sorry, gonna) post a long piece about some of my teaching experiences helping the hopeless and unemployable, but your new look blog wouldn’t accept it 🙁

I agree, Hmm. In most cases, in my experience, the parents of unsocialized “students” are ignorant lazy louts—always looking for something they can take as an insult. Black kids whose parents have middle class values (even when the parents are poor)—work hard, be respectful, be dignified—have the sweetest kids in the world, who are funny as heck and a joy to teach. And when such parents find out that their kid is acting like trash, they fix his wagon quick.

Families are broken. I bet if those kids had parents at home who would go ballistic on them if a teacher reported their behavior at school, they would change their tune.

8th grade social studies class. [Social studies is an invention of education perfessers who don’t know any history.] The subject is the holocaust. School curricula in the soft subjects are all about pieces. Someone in a curriculum meeting says, “We need something for the holocaust piece.” The group nods and smiles. “Yes, that’s a good piece.” Topics and books are suggested.The class is half white kids, one-third black kids, and the rest Asian and Hispanic.As I sit down to observe, I notice that my tinnitus is louder. “What’s the hissing?…. Oh, it’s not hissing. It’s shushing.” The teacher and her assistant are taking turns trying to calm their charges with a continuous shshshsh. When student noise increases to a higher decibel level, the two adults shush together. A more powerful shush. A serious shush.Two activities are going on. The teacher is yacking about a book the class was to have read—“The boy in the striped pajamas.” The students are also yacking—about one student’s hair (“Oooo, I just love that weave, girl.”), another student’s jacket (“Oooo, I just love that jacket, yo.”), or about TV or sports. The students are louder than the teacher. They occasionally look up when the teacher raises her voice.Occasionally, a student with a serious basketball jones let’s fly with a wad of paper aimed at the trash can. Other students say “Ooooo” or “That was close” or “Try again.”shshshshshshIf a teacher were to get serious about discipline, she would be immediately challenged. “What you got to say, huh? Yo. Yo?” A large male? The boys would be subdued.So, most female teachers, and timid male teachers, operate in a semi-hypnotic state—presenting material to no one in particular. This way, they avoid a beating, a stroke, or flying desks.The only students paying attention are the outsiders. The skinny boy with long greasy hair. The fat girl with pimples and braces. A black kid with glasses and buck teeth. And of course the Asians, who look like they just got off the boat. “What’s going on here?”The content—such as it is—is so superficial that I wonder why anyone pays attention, anyway.“How do you think the boy outside the fence feels?”“Isn’t it nice that a Jew and a nonJew are getting along so well? See, children aren’t prejudiced.”Nothing about “How long do you think the boy in the striped pajamas has till he’s turned into carbon dust?”No powerpoints showing piles of corpses. No quotations from U.S. soldiers who entered the camps. Nothing about the towns outside the camps.Or, “Listen. The Nazis were pikers when it came to death. Communists killed about a hundred million of their own people in the last century. Let’s broaden the topic. Do you think that there could be concentration camps here? No? Why is that?….Cambodians said the same thing. Here’s a field of skulls.”The teacher’s version of the textbook tells her to teach about conformity—as if a less conforming population would have prevented mass murder. Nothing on secret police, round ups, gulags. Nothing from Solzhenitzyn or Bonhoeffer.The whole lesson ends with the teacher saying the definition of conformity—“Doing what other persons do.” (so, alternating legs when walking is conformity?) She has students repeat the definition. Maybe ten students come out of the ozone to do this.The teacher ends with, “Remember that definition. Conformity is an important concept.”Teachers who get degrees from ed school don’t learn anything about the subjects they will teach. They learn HOW to teach subjects. They take “methods” courses, which are all variations on the theme of “Don’t teach the traditional way (that is, teach). Be a guide on the side. Facilitate students’ efforts to construct knowledge.”[What knowledge would that be?]So, they depend entirely on their teacher version of textbooks (which tells them what to teach) and on “mentor teachers” who are just as subject-ignorant.There is absolutely a strong and direct relationship between the percentage of black kids in class and disruptive behavior. Aside from the few with glasses, buck teeth, and parents who care, the rest have no interest at all in learning anything; they yack and joke continuously in loud voices, are out of their seats, walking around the room, or leaving the room. The least effort to calm them is seen as a provocation, to which they respond with various displays—throwing off their jackets, standing up and kicking their desk, threatening the teacher.Visit a charter or private school run by former military, and you get a very different picture.

I spent ten years teaching high school in the inner city. Every inner city teacher knows the truth: their classrooms are filled with dull and stupid kids who are neither capable nor interested in learning much of anything. No methodology, no flashy lesson plan, no new mandate from the state can possibly change that. You can’t teach a pig to sing. You just waste your time, and annoy the pig. JWM