Being a teacher comes with many responsibilities: one is responsible for teaching the students whatever content is there, maybe by following a curriculum, making sure students feel safe and comfortable within the confines of a classroom, trying to give them challenging and thought-provoking information and allowing them to work it out in their heads and through discussion.......or so I thought. The onset of this No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President Bush a little over a year ago, is currently wreaking havoc in the public school system. It expects a whole lot out of a public education system, which mostly, has been under fire and underfunded since the 1970s (since maybe before that, but certainly since the creation of Title I). This act tests students beginning in grade 3 and goes until grade 12. If a school is considered failing after 3 years, parents can remove their children from said school, AND using vouchers, put their children where the parents feel they'll be safest and best educated (meaning government money used for parochial school tuition and only if that school are willing to take the hellions that are some of my school's population). If the school is considered failing, the teachers are blamed, not the environment (which, of course, is much harder to pinpoint than the educators) and when students are removed from schools, those schools lose money and therefore, teachers will more than likely lose their jobs and the schools might close (I can hear the public education system being sucked into a vortex as I write this). On top of all of that testing and other crap, in the state in which I work, there is also testing that must be done at the state level (so it's testing that is government mandated AND state mandated...both sets of tests are designed and administered by the state). So, teachers get blamed for trying to teach something they probably don't want to, it puts a lot of pressure on the students to do well on these things (without proper skills) and well, the public schools get screwed if they can't go from failing to passing (according to whatever criteria developed by the federal government). While some things can be fixed at the school level, most of what needs to change would mean addressing lots of issues no one in this country wants to talk about (race and class, welfare issues, sex issues, parenting issues, drugs, crime, violence...the list is too long to write here) and finally realizing that in this country, Brown v. Board is, in some ways, only a pipe dream that has yet to come to fruition.

Oh and on another note, my principal told us today that an uncertified teacher is automatically a bad one and that parents have a right to scream bloody murder if their students aren't learning from certified teachers. I'm not certified. I have a bachelors in history and political science and a masters in social studies education, but i'm not certified, so that makes me a bad teacher. Nice huh? I spend an hour and a half in a meeting and instead of words of encouragement, i get told I suck because I don't have a piece of paper that says I can teach my subject "effectively." God, I love my job.