Don’t Confuse Children’s Needs With Adults’ Politics
The buzz about town is that UTLA might strike and I have been asked at least a dozen times what I think about it.
I think these teachers should have struck (“striked”?) years ago. Years and years and years ago.
That’s an answer given as a citizen, an adult, a thinker, a community member, a neighbor. It’s not an answer given as a parent, and one of an incipient college applicatee no less. I’m as worried as the next about the impact on my own child, on her learning, on my family and home life and all the rest of it.
But from the point of view of what I want for my child when I send her off to school, there just isn’t any question. There is no one at all anywhere who wants their child to be warehoused in a “classroom” of fifty kids. That isn’t a classroom of learning, that’s a storage facility and it is simply unconscionable. There really isn’t any other word for it.
So all the random fulminations about how class size isn’t really vital but instead the quality of the teacher is the most important metric or the manners of the child or his readiness to learn – this is just so much utter poppycock tossed up in the air hoping something, somewhere will stick.
And it has because what I also hear is everywhere whispered the bizarre claim that teachers calling for lower class sizes is just a “personnel issue” and a ‘self-serving union ploy’.
I just can’t get over the surreal not to mention oxymoronic nature of such comments. Unions by definition advocate for the rights of their members, so work toward this end is their purpose by design, not disgrace. And for legions of the working class to criticize fellow denizens of the same circumstance is just nothing short of confusing. How does it come to pass that so many would work against their own best interest?
Because that’s what’s happening when fellow common parents and citizens scorn Don’t Confuse Children’s Needs With Adults’ Politics – redqueeninla:
