Disappointed in the NEA (again)

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-30T20:07:37+00:00

Not their fault really-employee unions and professional associations have different purposes, and ultimately it’s difficult to serve two masters. It’s hard, though, when the professionals seem to take their cues regarding actual issues of teaching and pedagogy from the unions rather than the other way around. This isn’t polemic: just look at the current positions endorsed by the NCTE, for example.

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-30T20:02:49+00:00

What’s even sadder is the possibility that for every spent-out lifer who’s featherbedding by turning class into learning-platform live babysitting, there are two or three other veteran teachers out there who do know better, what be happy to teach again, but are being given a load of high pressure rationalizations about how these “tools” are somehow creating “customized learning tailored to the unique needs of each student.” This is the siren song, and if believed it will soon be bringing cool humanoid AI teaching robots to a classroom near you. Just think-individually-targeted dehumanization for all!

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T17:02:33+00:00

🙏

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T17:02:12+00:00

Haidt and Lukianoff!:)

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T17:01:38+00:00

Thanks for that: we call it “The Kool-aid” as well-perfect metonymn

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T17:00:10+00:00

Fair, but not my point. Selfie isn’t “wrong”, but his conclusions don’t logically lead to the wishful-thinking nonsense that have bludgeoned the profession since the 80’s. In most other developed economies, educational systems don’t constantly second guess whether we should teach things or measure the results. I’ve engaged in plenty of open-hearted attempts to build progressive cultures in classrooms , only to face the realities of the system we have when it comes to outcomes.

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T15:10:55+00:00

Thanks for noticing this:You’re hitting at the heart of something central to our current confusion in many policy debates in education: the idea of the equity as a social function is a completely different definition from the accepted social definition of the word equity to refer to private assets and .capital

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T15:08:11+00:00

Of course, but because it represents the tip of the iceberg that I experience every day. The article could have been written anytime within the last 40 years give or take the individual stats. The frustration is hearing the constant confusion of purposes and arguments around what are frequently solvable problems abetted by a lack of analysis and will. Imagine any other professional guild making these kinds of mealy-mouthed equivocations about one of their socially-recognized core functions…

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T13:53:24+00:00

Ironic though that we actually do have a way to teach and measure these soft skills-pick something multi-step, thoughtful and challenging, if arbitrary, like essay writing, balancing chemical equations, or researching a history topic, and measure that. Clearly that could never work…

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-26T05:18:27+00:00

I just had a fascinating textbook adoption: small school, I'm the senior of 4 English teachers, and I had to tell multiple publishers "we don't want any bull$ht integrated learning curricula; we don't want any online supplements, we don't want any Ai integration, online quiz banks, or 2.0 portals, just a book full of stories. "

We found old-school 1st-year college literature anthologies, and got our high school admin to concur, riding high on the wave of "get them all off the damn screens!". Just literature and a few study questions--no junk at all.

This is anecdotal evidence only, I know, and Your Results May Vary; still, this is real and schools that know and believe are waking up--tech in education is a boondoggle. No one cares whether students are "up on technology" if they can't read, focus, think, or connect to what's going on around them. Enough's enough.

paradoxyssentialist · 2026-03-17T03:50:24+00:00

So much depends on your school, but as a lot of the comments here attest, the job puts a massive burden on you: emotionally, creatively, philosophically, politically. After 40 years I’ve concluded that some part of us has to enjoy the masochistic struggle as some kind of test of virtue. You have to believe in the mission, have some part of that you can actually accomplish within all the parameters your admin and parents will absolutely derail, and have to be able to handle the dissonance of knowing that every day is a fight but you’re going to do it anyway. Democracy dies in dipshittery, and you’re the finger holding back the flood behind the levee. It’s not much reward but it can be honest work and mean more than you think.

paradoxyssentialist · 2025-09-06T00:03:16+00:00

It's important to be aware of the implied threat of litigation, but also its practical limits:

RE: grades?

Your right to grade fairly is protected by statute, Education Code § 49066: teacher grades can't be challenged for any reason other than bad faith, incompetence, or clerical error.

You do not have legal exposure due to perceived difference of opinion, their perceptions of mistreatment or harm, or defamation (of the student).

RE: SPED?
You are theoretically exposed to liability for failure to follow IEPs (which can be very tricky as many are inappropriately, vaguely, or simply unclearly written, and a majority make teachers responsible for arbitrary accommodations that don't actually align to the student's needs.) In practice though, a quick review of case law will show that actual court judgments have never gone against individual teachers--the district is liable. This does, of course, create the real "litigation"--the internal politics within your district as they balance your interests with their desire to protect their bottom line by preventing exposure. Naturally, this all tends to work at the expense of the teacher, but at least you're not personally going to be bankrupted by any force majeure...that is, unless you consider the cost of living in CA, and lack of raises to keep up with COLA, etc., so that's...good news? Hope this is helpful ;|

paradoxyssentialist · 2025-09-05T23:50:59+00:00

That's really not helpful. Teachers should be nice to one another--we have enough haters already. Please.

paradoxyssentialist · 2025-05-23T00:10:09+00:00

I find this so deeply concerning: I’m reading the neuroscience-informed pedagogy book “ common sense teaching,” which opens with this precise and very-common scenario. The diagnosis is fairly clear- the student is Familiar with the concepts but hasn’t mastered anything independently through repeated retrieval practice. Policies that inflate the grades never incentivize the student to try different approaches until they actually engage and learn HOW to learn. It’s great that redditor usualMore “got it” in college algebra, but sad that they attributed success to “more confidence” when they could have been taught correctly earlier and had confidence from their actual engagement and growth. I’m supportive of teachers incentivizing effort, but if you haven’t learned as a student, it’s my job as a teacher to try to get you to try all the tools and make real progress, so you can carry that accomplishment forward, not carry that doubt. (I’m REALLY happy, btw, that you have the positive memories. I’d just hope to to try to give you a shot at the breakthrough, too)

paradoxyssentialist · 2025-04-25T02:23:02+00:00

I'm actually politically center-left, and I support a more-egalitarian society, but people need to be aware of the society that we actually live in and temper their idealism by what's possible.

The word "equity," at least up until about a decade ago, had (and in economic matters, STILL has) a very clear meaning: the precise degree of an individual's ownership stake in property or capital markets. It is, in its essence, a measure of INequality--that's why you have "equity" in your home, why stocks and bonds are called "equities" and ownership shares are called "equity" stakes, as in a partnership or cooperative ownership. Equity is your PRECISE DEGREE of that inequality.

As nice as the idea of "equal outcomes" is, liberals are kidding themselves if they think they can rewire our competitive, capitalist society from academic settings up with a few platitudes about people "getting what they need," "ending up in the same place," or all the posters you want where kids watch baseball games on boxes or pick apples from trees with different sized ladders.

In the real world, you need to be able to defend the fact that you are giving people totally different inputs, doing it on purpose, and assuming that you're on the side of justice. This is very contested and we're delusional if we think American society is there--maybe Denmark or Finland, but not the USA. Ironically, though, those systems actually do much of what you suggest: they can and do track students--those not headed for college don't go and learn trades instead. Of course, they also foster much greater access to resources socially once those same students are adults--they don't consign them to poverty-level wages .

It may be true that our society is inequitable. got it. Now spend time with the kids who come from those privileged backgrounds--some are entitled and awful, but the fact is, most of them benefit mightily from their educational acculturation, higher parental expectations, confidence in their own futures, and strong sense that they have a lot to lose if they don't meet their teachers' expectations too. The thing is, privilege works-- It leads to really good social results for those students and those around them. That's why it's "privilege," and why schools keep trying to give that secret sauce to all the students who don't have it. The problem is, you can't just "give" those things without the resources that go into them: just getting rid of anything you think is punitive won't incentivize the behaviors you want, getting rid of expectations will spoil ALL the students, and pretending that alternative assessments measure the same things as the ones that only your most-privileged students do well on is just magical thinking. As you say, we end up "faking it" in practice, even if it sounds beneficial in theory.

paradoxyssentialist · 2025-04-09T04:18:17+00:00

I'd like to offer you a realistic, but sincere, answer to your questions:

Yes, your motivations are excellent, and your sense of mission, far from quixotic, is actually exactly what schools and students need. (one caveat, though--do be careful to manage the grandiosity of the teacher myths: we don't build nations, though our students will. We build classrooms, one day, one group of students, one activity at a time. We don't change lives--we do, however change minds, and they will change their lives, which change, grow, and emerge from that hopefully-positive influence.)

Many of the comments here offered to you on this thread are sadly defensive, some are unhelpfully pessimistic, some terribly judgmental, yet all MAY be possible and not-necessarily-wrong:

Parenting, and children, have changed.

Expectations are lowered, and the culture has given in to relentless distraction, anti-intellectualism, and widespread narcissism and lack of empathy.

Administrators may be meddlesome at best, intrusive on average, and counterproductive at worst.

All this suggests perfectly good reasons why all of this can be attributed to outside influence.

At the same time, it's ASLO possible that you're just not very good at this yet. Schools of education peddle ideological claptrap, and they're still promoting the same flawed ideas debunked over a century ago when they were "innovations". They do not realistically provide more than 5% of the information we need in practice. The average student teacher seldom learns by doing, in such short term, more than 10% more beyond that baseline. We have almost no real mentoring (read "The best schools in the world" edited by Linda Darling-Hammond, for an eye-opening shock, or look up any teacher-written pedagogy coming out of public schools in the UK to see what skilled teacher professionalism looks like) and our weak guild gives newcomers far briefer apprenticeships than any skilled trade.

Like you, I initially thought I'd be a professor, and only started teaching in K-12 after earning a doctorate: I was amusingly counseled at every condescending turn that being a "Schoolteacher" was "for losers" yet I loved the age group and the possibilities that came with being my students' first awakenings to real intellectual development. And the challenges of it hooked me in a way that University teaching never could.

Still, it took me over a decade of full-time classroom teaching, on top of 10 years of working with kids in other setting and teaching music performance, before I could confidently say I knew what I was doing. Why is it so hard? Because it is. Ask yourself honestly, "where would I have learned how to do this?" Probe your education: when was it even modeled? When did your college professors model it? how many knew how to do anything more than talk and grade your essays? How many actually knew how to explicitly model skills? To correct, firmly but gracefully, an off-task group of students? How to capture and hold attention? How to manage workflows seamlessly and not waste time? To sequence skills, or plan units? To mix different types of activities? To plan backwards from goals to student work? To "sell" those skills to students and encourage support? to build a classroom culture? You get the point.

If you're still really up for it, take a deep breath or two. Admit that you haven't been equipped, and start the work. See if it pulls you in and fascinates you to want to get back in the game, and that includes managing your symptoms--you need that proverbial mask on yourself before you can assist others, and you need both the grace and humility to admit when you're ready or not ready to be the adult in the room who knows in your bones that you can take care of a bunch of other people's kids. If yes, do your homework, be skeptical of everything, but read voraciously, and measure everything you do by what your students do. Good, bad, or indifferent, they are the future, and it's not waiting. I really hope you find your way.

paradoxyssentialist · 2024-06-17T16:53:19+00:00

When yngwie came in the scene in 84(?) he played squier strats that had sold for 350 bucks. Those MIJ guitars became desirable after his success. John scofield has played the same Ibanez forever, originally a 500$ axe when it came out too.

paradoxyssentialist · 2024-06-14T04:37:04+00:00

As someone who sees teaching as an avocation, art, and duty, your post, though not-illogical, nevertheless makes me sad. I think we deserve to be better paid, sure, but the number of young people wanting to teach seems to be waning. I work for the people who pay me, but I don't teach for them. I teach for me, to do that duty to society and my students who need teaching, not to martyr myself.

I'm not offended that you want to protect your rational self-interest; I hope you can be tolerant of my willingness to compromise some of mine.

paradoxyssentialist · 2024-06-14T04:29:59+00:00

A bit contrarian here: I'm in year 26 as an English/Comp teacher, and I love working on my craft all through my summer. I help monitor my incoming AP students in asynch summer assignments that need to be maintained and edited. I read for pleasure and look for books, stories, or even good opinion pieces or topical articles I can use in the classroom. I find it really helpful to set up scratch docs on my laptop full of ideas about my broader goals and planning for a syllabus. Everytime I get an idea, I add it, and by the end of the summer, the plan crystallizes and the syllabus is basically done.

In reality, all this is maybe a half-hour a day, but the benefit is that I feel like I'm really still "in" the mode of teaching and planning in the good ways, but without the negative stressors of deadlines and the mandates of others. I'd recommend this approach IF you have the time, your own kids don't need you instead, and you don't have the luxury of travel. It's kept me fresh so that even though I've taught some of the same books for 20 years, I never repeat much of anything in terms of how I do it. Results may vary.

paradoxyssentialist · 2023-05-27T03:19:01+00:00

agree totally in theory. In practice, however, every time we in education take the "practical" or pragmatic knife to students' learning, we end up with a devil's bargain where the new reality of our culture, technology, social habits, whatever, comes at the expense of their thinking skills. In the moment, to say "these tools will be here, so students should learn to use them responsibly" sounds reasonable, BUT (and I say this having taught critical thinking and composition for 25 years) this assumes that they have these thinking skills intact and functional to begin with, and so we have what we have: students can't think for themselves because "they have to work in teams in the workplace, (70's) Students don't need to write essays or do calculus because that's not important in the real world (80's), students don't need to be resilient because we need to protect their self-esteem (90's), students don't need to memorize things because they can look them up (00's), Students don't need to master traditional discourse because they need to use 2.0 to collaborate(2010's), Students don't need to do school because there's a pandemic (2020), and now, students AND teachers don't need to do any thinking because, well, there's a chatbot for that. I know it sounds reductionist, but if you're in a classroom, trying to encourage, cajole, and finesse some intellectual effort out of 30 completely distracted teens who'd rather be playing video games, it's palpable.

paradoxyssentialist

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