Daily Kos: Respect for teachers - Yes and No

Daily Kos: Respect for teachers - Yes and No:

Respect for teachers - Yes and No

by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)

is the title of this widely distributed blog post by Joe Nathan, Director of the Center for School Change at Macalaster College in St. Paul, MN. He begins by writing

I was stunned. There were more than 36 million responses to a Google search for the phrase “teachers get no respect.” At the same time, a respected national poll shows widespread respect for teachers. And given the chance to reduce their taxes, thousands of Minnesota voters instead responded, “yes” to maintaining or increasing their tax levels.

(Nathan feels that most Americans respect teachers, but that perhaps some teachers do not respect parents.) Yet despite the the data which shows strong national support for teachers, many teachers increasingly express their frustration that they, their profession, and the work they do is not respected. Nathan responds to this by writing

Let’s acknowledge several things:

- Creative, effective teachers deserve all the praise we can offer.
- Teaching can be very demanding and difficult.

Newt's War on Poor Children

by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)

Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.

So begins Charles Blow in this New York Times column which I assure you is a must read.

He notes Gingrich's remarks about poor children, saying "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works." Actually, the full statement by Gingrich is offensive, far more than having poor children do janitorial work in schools. Blow provides the complete statement, then says bluntly

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is - but then, most of the people here probably knew that already, right?

But there's more . . .