Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

> Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them

Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.

> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism

No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.

In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.

The teachers were worried about Covid.

Kids weren't vaccinated.

School's so stupid. If you give people a grade and tell them to maximize it, with no meaningful rewards that they can understand, they're going to cheat. Duh. I regret not cheating in school, what a waste of time all of that shit was.

The teacher is basically like "haha dumb kids, we know you're cheating" and "if only we could punish students more!". There's a lot of "the smart kids are suffering because of the dumb kids" attitude here that I find disgusting.

> That too was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types.

Oh god, how awful that these students won't get to suffer through some idiot's assignment that I'm sure would greatly better their life.

There's a lot wrong with school but I feel like this teacher doesn't realize that they're a part of that.

> Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school!

Yes, it's cheating. They have an incentive, as your students do, to 'pass', and so they cheat.

Give students a place to be during the day while their parents work. Give them real, meaningful incentives that matter to young people - money, freedom, social structure, a feeling of productivity - and align those with learning real, practical skills, like how to read, write, analyze context, etc.

Hire non-idiots, pay them more, reduce class sizes. Yeah it'll cost more, but the obvious economic benefits will offset that. I can count on one hand how many teachers I had that I respected - the rest were obvious failures.

If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different?

I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.

Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.

I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.

I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.

All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.

If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.

No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD.

If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.