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  1. Fred Thornton
    July 13, 2022 @ 10:34 am

    There is the paradox of good teachers, and there is also the dilemma faced by anyone attempting to be a good teacher. When a teacher is rated, paid promoted and retained, on more than the level of skill they can impart all kinds of things tend to go sideways into the ditch. The current sad state of America’s intellectual competence stands as proof of what happens when the student’s emotional response to the instruction gets included in how a teacher is assigned as “good” or “bad.”

    The very best teacher I ever had would not survive in today’s school environment. Some touchy-feely damn fool would have had him sacked for his signature style that was, to probably 75% of his students, the first proof they’d seen that it was possible for a teacher to be a human being who might be trustworthy rather than a certain to be deceitful minion of a hostile machine. With the potential for trust comes the potential for mutual respect, and with mutual respect comes the potential for not only effective education but full mentoring as well.

    How did he establish such an environment in his classroom? By being brutally (and accurately) honest. First day of a jr. high drafting class… you have to see this in your minds eye to fully understand… and we are all kicked back on our stools behind the drawing tables fiddling with the tools we were told to buy, laughing and yacking and waiting… there was no adult in the room. He walked in with the bell ringing, a stocky bulldog of a man who limped a bit from an old war wound he’d acquired flying pathfinder on the Schweinfurt raid, gray hair and steel blue eyes that missed nothing. He set his coffee cup down on his desk and leaned on the lectern. You could feel his eyes, the room fell silent. He looked us over in dead silence for a good fifteen seconds, and then shrugged, and with a smirk snorted like an old bull. I will never forget his first words. In today’s world his demeanor and words would be called abusive, but in point of fact they were absolutely perfect.

    “I do not have the time to teach you dumb ass yard apes the science of engineering,” and then a shade of relaxed, a hint of a smile, “but, if you’ll hang with me, I can teach you the art of the thing.” He was true to his word, what he taught was the art of working with reality… how to see it for what it was so you could draw it as it was, or would be… a skill of reality. There is no way to express in words what that was worth to us when we all intuitively knew that what was going on in the rest of the school was an attempt to make us deny and distort reality to be emotionally correct… even if it meant destroying yourself in the process. This very day over fifty years later I am, literally, working with what he taught me and my gratitude is undiminished.

    The issue of what makes a good teacher revolves around leadership. Leadership is an ability that has to be learned and earned in the field as it were, it will never come out of a university classroom. Because of that understanding my stance on this subject is and always will be that it should be absolutely taboo, I mean sell your granny to a Baghdad whorehouse taboo, to hire anyone as a public school teacher who does not have a minimum of ten years experience in some, any, other form of human endeavor. The positive feedback loop of those who liked going to school going to school to teach school has almost destroyed this nation. THAT was the door Empire Academia’s Kingdom of Psychology used to usurp public education and attack the foundation culture of the United States.

Watchman, what of the night?