It's a good thing we have comic strip artists to expose our hideous maneuvers to destroy the educational system of America through pure idiocy and laziness:
Because, of course, cinema has no literary value, and tie-ins with books kids may or may not have bothered to read are what has made our society predominately aliterate.
And who are we to diverge from textbook practice to try to reach different learners?
And just when you might think that was sympathy for those of us who are sick of kids not following directions, parents deciding they get to set their own assignments for others' classes, and completely miss the point of condensing information and presenting it in a new way that cannot just be copied and pasted from wikipedia...
...even the subs are insulted. (Not that we who regularly make our own plans, activities, and assessments haven't had our run-ins with under-qualified subs...but really, Allison Barrows, does this make you feel better?)
And here, the artist might perhaps be acknowledging students' passing the buck, might actually be acknowledging that there are good teachers who are undermined by a culture of blame, but take a closer look at the teacher's
flat screen computer monitor. Honestly, how many people do you know like this, educators? (Note also how proud she was of this assertion with the signature on the chalkboard.)
But I will grant the artist this: she's showing that parents (God forbid) can do something about their kids' education (though the chances of the teen actually reading the readings parents assign, I suspect, are no greater than the chances they read the ones teachers assign.) Oh, and hey, at least we have one last champion of the DWM's and antiquated canonical texts. Yippee.
There was a time I enjoyed this comic strip for its fun take on teens, and PreTeen(a)s, but now I can't decide if I'd rather give it up entirely or to keep reading with the same fascination that draws people's attention to train wrecks and Bill O'Reilly.
Comments (5)
teachers are easy targets bc in fact they are responsible for the education of the next generation and there are a lot of teachers who don't take that responsibility seriously (for whatever reason). the hard fact is that the good ones get lumped together with the bad ones. i found i couldn't pay attention to stuff like this and just had to focus on doing my best on a day when i wasn't at my best.
I've always loved Preteena too, but I was dismayed by the recent series of strips. Clearly the artist has an ax to grind, at the expense of us all. Sigh. . .
Is there a link to these? Kenn said he thinks the woman who wrote them must have a kid in a school system and an ax to grind with his/her teachers. We are such targets... when most of the time, if teaching was the ONLY responsibility we had, we could do it, but parents have to meet us in the middle and contribute, letting their kids know the value of an education instead of saying, "I had to go through it, so you do, too."
Amen. I don't know any teachers like the ones here, but I do recognize the students and the parents. I don't know when teachers became the adversaries of parents and students... I wish more parents would take a stand and tell their children that education is important instead of undermining it, as this cartoonist is doing. There are some bad teachers out there, but they are few and far between... the rest of us are just struggling to make a difference in an increasingly hostile environment.
Thanks for the post. Interesting.
I think it's interesting that the author sees it as spending money on "education", while I see it as spending on money on child-rearing, since most parents seem to have outsourced this process to the government. Obviously since outsourcing in the US is a costly process, perhaps we will be sending these jobs overseas soon?