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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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"the person everyone is paying attention to" is pretty strongly correlated with status

Children don’t generally hold their teachers in high regard, in my experience. And they pay attention to them all day every day.

My (not extremely reliable) memory from my childhood is that teachers were highly regarded throughout early elementary school, though that respect was greatly diminished by the end of elementary school and nonexistent by middle school.

I think children hold the good teachers in high regard. Most teachers aren't good. I think if we broke teachers unions and empowered school choice, we could quickly see a great deal of very good teachers teaching. Everyone loves a good teacher in the right circumstances, from students to parents to administrators to the good teacher themselves because it's such a fulfilling job. But in public schools where the principals receive the same salary regardless of performance, and powerful unions dedicated to preserving jobs over teaching children, good teachers are secondary to minimally risky teachers who don't get the school bad press.

I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t remember a single teacher or professor from my school years fondly, except for the 10th grade English teacher that 15-year-old me badly wanted to fuck. And I attended very highly ranked (albeit public) schools and a historically top tier university program. I certainly didn’t think of these people as high status.

But I’ve read a fair number of sappy “the amazing teacher I’ll never forget” stories from Redditors over the years, so I’ll concede that I’m probably a minority.

Did any of your peers regard any teachers fondly at the time? No one was going, "Oh, it's too bad you got Mrs. Alice for math, she can't teach! I'm lucky I got Mr. Bob, he's hilarious and makes the subject make sense"?

Nope. A few professors were reviled for being harsh graders, but that’s about it.

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