When I look back to my days incarcerated in the educational system, it is just way too easy to think of way too many bad teachers. This, let me remind you, is the group of people that dares to bitch and moan about being underpaid. My ass. They're overpaid. They should take their three months vacation and shut their damn traps.
Some of the stupidest people I ever met were school teachers. I still swear my eighth-grade algebra teacher was teaching the subject while she learned it. I learned more about the aerodynamics of paper airplane flight that year than any other, and still passed without a problem.
And if the infamous substitute teacher isn't the world's classic example of a complete and utter idiot, what is?
Sure, there are some good teachers. Just like there are some good politicians. But let's do a little experiment. Think back for a moment. Give yourself a few minutes to remember the teachers that have positively influenced your life. Those individuals of whom the TV commercials and politicians are constantly trying to remind us. Those wonderfully unflawed, self-sacrificial helpers of society. Those underpaid, overworked, last-remaining bastions of free thinking.
I'm sorry. Let me apologize for making you waste those precious seconds.
Now think of something else. Think of the teachers who were mean, lazy, ignorant, or moronic. I bet it takes you half the time to think of just as many. These are the teachers that you would be perfectly ambivalent to see writhing in pain under the wheels of a school bus, ground into the hot blistering tar like any other common rodent.
The point is, bad teachers are some of the most incompetent and/or stupid and/or mean people in existence.
How did I possibly come to this conclusion? Everyone has their own empirical evidence, but here's more of mine:
- A history teacher that was cool because he listened to bands like 10,000 Maniacs, but didn't succeed in teaching a single historical fact in the entire freshman year of high school.
- A balding, flabby, comatose math teacher that turned the art of logic, reasoning, and utilizing the power of the human mind into a task more laborious and revolting than crawling through 100 yards of human feces.
- A middle-aged teacher much in need of a facelift, but who nevertheless was well-loved for her "down-to-earth" teaching style, not to mention her fifty-minute bull session otherwise known as an "honors" English class.
- A seventy-year-old braces-wearing witch that was more interested in making the students follow rules than actually helping them learn.
- An Ellsworth Toohey type (see The Fountainhead) that took pleasure in using his film class to indoctrinate unknowing college students into accepting "we are our brother's keeper" as a mantra for living.
It wasn't until college - outside of regular classes - that I truly realized the potential excitement of learning.
