PSA #1

I am a teacher and from time to time I feel the need to rant about things that irritate me to death about children, parents, education, whatever...so I'm going to call these Public Service Announcements from your friendly special education teacher. Enjoy!

If you have a school aged child who is "too sick" to come to school, then don't have them at the local grocery store after school hours. If they were "too sick" to come to school, then please don't be spreading their disease and sickness to everyone else, seeing as how I'm subjected to that quite enough, thank you. On the flip side, if they are well enough to be grocery shopping, then send them to school. Without the education you are so flippantly denying them, you are undeniably cursing them to complete the devastating and destructive cycle which your life has undoubtedly followed, as well, I am sure, as your predecessors did. We teachers are working tirelessly to provide your children with a sound education to help them succeed in their future endeavors and to break this cycle of failure; however, when you blatantly disregard the importance of education, you are making our job that much more difficult.

On another note, and I'm not trying to get political, but for all the people who only watch Fox news and who think that schools will allow the classroom to be a platform for policies, you obviously have never set foot in a classroom, nor do you understand the principals behind teaching. This is not, I am quite positive, the only time that "lesson plans" have been available for political speeches and we are not "brainwashing" your children to become "crazy liberals." If you are keeping your child home for fear that we will "force" them to watch OUR president give a speech about the importance of staying in school, then you are no better than the person above who disregards education. You may teach your children whatever beliefs you feel are important to you, but at the end of the day, the thing that makes America the great nation that it is, is the fact that we are all allowed to have these differing opinions. While I may not agree with you, it doesn't mean I don't respect what you have to say. I only wish that you would be considerate enough to consider BOTH views as perfectly acceptable. The school is a place for children of all ages to learn to think for themselves, not simply regurgitate information that has been force fed to them for 12 years. That is where the beauty of a true education lies.