I’m sure everybody’s heard about the teacher who showed up to work drunk, two times the legal limit.
It’s all over the radio stations here in the bay area. This morning on my way to work, I listened to one station invite listeners to provide input on whether it is right that the school is not revealing the name of the teacher. It evidently hits close to home for a lot of students, because a fair amount of the callers were students of some variety or another.
Perhaps the most distressing part of this whole experience is not in that the teacher arrived drunk. It isn’t something teachers should be showing or sharing with their students. It’s a terrible example to set for students and teachers (especially if the teacher was held in any kind of esteem), and it’s not something most parents want to expose their children to.
That said, I’ve had a chance to listen to these children.
What are they learning in school?
It seems to me they either aren’t paying attention to the teacher in the first place, or the teachers are using some of the most rudimentary “Valley Girl/Guy” talk I’ve ever heard. I know we live in California, and we’re well known for our “like,” “seriously,” “ohmigod” speech patterns, but REALLY! If you’re trying to explain why you think it’s morally wrong for your TEACHER to arrive to school DRUNK, show some class (and I don’t mean the kind that has a teacher). Use that eloquence from apparent bygone eras. It’s not just the english, the grammar — it’s how the arguments are presented.
I can see the courtrooms of tomorrow.
“Yea, my defendant is, like, not guilty. Yea. She totally didn’t do that cause it’s wrong. It’s like, you know, wrong. So yea. She didn’t do it.”
Doctors would diagnose you, let you know that your, like, head was hurting, and like, here, take some painkillers.
Knowledge is nothing without the ability to explain, to express. Knowledge is nothing without understanding.
Try defining a word you use every day (like is a good example!). Now, go look it up on dictionary.com.
Defining and understanding are two different things. There are 29 entries for “Like” on dictionary.com.
It helps to use words in a sentence, and that is actually one of the best ways to actually understand a word instead of defining it.
Knowledge and understanding are half the battle, though. In our downward spiral on an educational level, it seems the blame can lay half on the “system” and half on the parents. I am blaming parents, indeed I am. I will not lay the excuse “I’m a parent so I can blame us” on you parents, since I myself am guilty of the same thing.
We are raising our children so that they will excel in this system, so they will appear to be brilliant when really they are merely excellent data storage systems.
We want calculating, cunning, computing. We have massive hard-drive banks and no CPUs or RAM, no circuitry uniting all together to form a machine that will learn and grow, teach and show. Pink Floyd taught us to be afraid of the machine, but I say, without that machine, we will all start waving fire-on-a-stick around and thumping on our chests.
Let’s start showing our children, helping them learn what things mean by understanding, not by memorization. English is only hard to learn if you try to memorize. The same could be said of any language – computers, math, Spanish, German, Japanese.
Let’s all help rebuild our future so it doesn’t look as hopeless as it does now. Our children are our future, and right now, the future doesn’t look very “bright”
