Reply #38: What other job:

[boppers]

1. Doesn't require you to create functional work product?
2. Allows you to bully and harass 20 to hundreds of people based on your own political, social, and racist views?
3. Has massive unions that prevent the most incompetent people from being fired?
4. Allows bias so consistently, that the very terms for that bias ("teacher's pet") actually become part of the popular lexicon?
5. Is so loosely controlled that you can get paid.... for making people watch movies?
6. Rewards consistent failure, year after year, with no accountability?

I had 2 (yes, two) really good teachers. Out of the 70-ish I've been "taught" by. I had maybe ten merely competent ones, and vastly more who had no real grasp on their subject matter, and were simply there to collect a check.

Some examples:
The 10th grade economics teacher who didn't know what a "black market" was.
The 9th grade english teacher who thought that all poetry had to rhyme.
The 4th grade elementary school teacher that couldn't perform (let alone explain) algebra.
The 6th grade science teacher that didn't understand string theory.
The 14th grade (college, sophomore year) computer science teacher who didn't know how software compilers tokenize.

I was disappointed by an awful lot of teachers, before I realized that they were basically not prepared for their job, and if I wanted to be educated, I had to do it all by myself. There are an awful lot of folks in the profession who simply belong elsewhere.

Chances are, I could walk into *any* public school in a 50 mile radius of me, and not find a 4th grade teacher doing algebra, or a 6th grade teacher doing string theory. Hell, when I was enrolled in a generic public High School, teachers were focusing on constructing a *paragraph*, and they had actually had classes on addition and subtraction.... the kinds of things that you shouldn't be allowed to leave elementary school without knowing.