Originally Posted by Kazuhito
Reminds me of the school that I went to back in New Orleans. It sucked and was on the verge of being shut down because it had failed two inspection tests. The teachers there were just...okay, I liked the way they were, but most people wouldn't. These teachers were realistic...and they hit students that didn't listen to them. Seriously, on my first day, one of my teachers threw a book at a student and smacked him on the neck. "Oh hell...I'm going to die..." were like the first thoughts that popped into my head that day. These teachers though, most of them actually went to good schools, but I guess they were just worn down working at the school. I'm not sure, but I think it ended up getting shut down. I left a few weeks before their third inspection came back up. The teachers there didn't care about the students all that much, there were a few nice teachers, and I lucked out on having them, but they didn't really talk to us much about jobs and after school. They said it's just something we'll have to work out for ourselves.
Also, today in class, three guys that just got back from tours of duty in Iraq came and talked to us. It was kinda cool getting some of their insight and how much the media really covers things up. Apparently there was maybe at the most only 5% on the news of what really was going on. One of them said it isn't as bad as people make it out to be, a lot of the country is really safe now and he helped work on new schools and stuff. Then they talked to us about joining and stuff, and one of them really...really latched onto me and wants me to join the army. I've been thinking about it more and more lately now that I look back on it. o_o
That school had to be awful...I'm really surprised that ours is even able to stay open as it is; we get little to no government funding and we get hit incredibly hard by the way schools are funded locally...bascially the way it happens in Ohio is that schools get the great majority of their funding from property taxes, so, naturally, rich districts get more money whether or not their students are performing. Compare that to my school where the most senior, tenured teachers may make upwards of $25,000 a year...they pretty much have to sacrifice everything to get our school up to the state standards, which are generally known to be insanely high thanks to our crackpot governor Bob Taft who believes that simply because he raises standards, children will automatically meet them, no matter what their educational circumstances are like, and if they don't, the government automatically comes in, basically fires everyone, and takes over the school. This isn't even counting the testing burdens that No Child Left Behind put on us...the school has to take a full month or two out of their normal teaching schedules for the sophomores just so they can memorize information for proficiency testing...and somehow we end up scraping an acceptable rating from the state every year; how we dp I have no idea but I suppose we're just lucky.
I can understand the way your teachers were though...if they're taking punishment into their own hands like that it sounds like they feel they're so close to having to close down the school that they shouldn't even have to care anymore. Admittedly I've always thought that teachers should have the right to be more aggressive toward students who are wasting class time and the teacher's efforts; kids should have the fear of living in poor conditions all their lives put into them somehow, though what methods could be used I have no idea. Really sucks that you had to go through that though...I think poorly-performing schools are more common than a lot of people realize, because most people who are even slightly concerned with it in the first place are the ones who have to go to them...nobody in the elite circles of society or the government could care less about it because either they're delusional, assume the best, or just couldn't care for being born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouth.
We had an Iraq War veteran at our school last year; I accidentally made him furious because I was usually sarcastic about everthing in government class. We had some irrationally anti-American German exchange students and I never stopped mocking all the hateful things they'd say about us, so for some reason we were suppoed to write down the answer to "What is an American?" in class, so I, completely forgetting the vet was in the room, decided to lampoon the Germans as usual and wrote "Fat, smelly, retarded arab-killers" and he saw it when he was going around the room...not fun. Yeah, as long as you sign up in peacetime, the army isn't bad o_o; My one friend is joining the Navy after he graduates, and he was showing me statistics on a website about people who enter it...apparently they get a lot of free stuff from the government on top of making about $80,000 a year after five years or so, not to mention free college...and, usually seeing how the Navy is rarely used in combat anymore, it didn't look half bad. But, if you do decide to join, just make sure we aren't going to war with Iran first <_<;
Yeah...the media does cover most good news in Iraq up because the basic principle is that bad news gets more viewers...it's almost getting to the point of being subversive to our efforts now but as long as the people who are actually fighting know all of the good that's happening it really shouldn't affect them. I just hope we don't get to the point of treating them like villains like the last generations did with the Vietnam vets when they got home...admittedly it was far, far worse back then but, as always, it tends to be the governments and generals who are detached from the actual fighting rather than the soldiers who are to blame for anything.