Class in the Classroom

This has gone viral, but for all the wrong reasons, and it sorta pisses me off:

Dr. Woody'd be a WHOLE lot more impressed if his (spoiled, pampered) child were expressing his frustrations to the local School Board, his parents, and the administration.

The teacher's doing the best she can, I promise. Jeff Bliss, the "star" of the vid, is an 18-year-old sophomore. The majority of kids graduate at 18, if they're gonna graduate at all. An 18-year-old sophomore-going-on-junior-and STILL in high school is NOT the first person from whom I'd think i'd get a useful critique. But that aside...It's the teacher who gets the brunt of the attack, and that's wrong.

Under the regime of meritricious meritocratic "accountability," the teachers' whole livelihood reposes in the hands (and brains) of people over whom she may exert no actual authority, exercise no actual control, and have no say in the care or other education of her students. 

They're evaluated on the basis of test scores, over the antecedent conditions of which they literally have no control.

The teacher's attitude may appear blase--but you're 17 only once; she's taught 17-year-olds for 20 years, and you get used to it.

Besides, the kid's a poser. He's playing for the homeroom. He's learned the drill, he's ventriloquizing the complaints. But he's just showing off for some girl. 

If he were actually serious, he'd follow the example of Damon Fowler, of Bastrop, Louisiana. An atheist and graduating senior at Bastrop High School in Louisiana, Fowler complained aloud, to school officials and the press about the prayers scheduled to be part of his commencement ceremony. After consulting with an attorney, the school agreed to drop the prayer. Unfortunately, though predictably, Fowler has since been ostracized by the community and even attacked by a school official in the local newspaper.

I'll leave you with this account of what Damon Fowler suffered at home:

He got death threats, his mother tried to stop him communicating with his own brother. A group of people who disliked Damon assembled at a local church and Damon soon came to feel virtually everyone in the town where he grew up hated him. ^[4] His parents first held him in the house and stopped him communicating with anyone else, his sister contacted an older brother who took Damon away. Then Damon's parents cut off financial support and his mother threw out Damon’s belongings onto the front porch. [5

NOTHING like dat good, CHRISTIAN love.