An Elitist Rant

Sometimes, teachers make mistakes. They may give consequences instead of getting a kid to open up about her outburst. They may have the class put their heads down for 5 minutes instead of using a brilliant learning activity to get them to calm down. They may not correctly predict how long it will take students to do a particular assignment. They may not always be able to tell which students have serious issues going on at home. They may not study all pieces of student work closely as they grade papers.

And sometimes teachers are so fucking stupid they are an insult to the profession.

Recently some third grade teachers in Georgia created some word problems for their students. Here are some samples:

Can't you just see the third graders making connections between these problems and their lesson about Frederick Douglass? I mean, of course a painful issue like slavery should be reduced to multiplication problems, right? Maybe next week they can do division problems about the Holocaust. 

I have been an over-worked, stressed out teacher forced to create lessons and homework to match district dictated guidelines. And I have no sympathy for these idiots. I do think their careers should be ruined. They are not smart enough to be teachers. And not just because they think that a cross-curricular activity means plugging in vocabulary words from the social studies lesson into the math homework. I really don't understood how they could think that parents wouldn't raise hell about this. How ignorant of history do you have to be to not grasp how inappropriate this is? 

I admit I'm an elitist. I want the president to be smart. I want the doctors who care for my family to be smart. Yes, there are different kinds of intelligence. No, I don't think you have to be conventionally smart to be a valuable member of society. But yes, if you are teaching children how to read and write and multiply and think then I think you should be smart. If you are a surgeon, you should have steady hands. If you are a bus driver, you should be a good driver and have a high tolerance for noise. If you work in retail, you should know how to smile and make small talk. And if you are a freaking teacher, you should be smart enough to create meaningful cross-curricular activities that aren't culturally offensive. 

Is that really too much to ask?