Respect

To relax after a long day at work and the hospital, I watched My Name is Earl last night. For anyone who hasn't seen it, Earl is an uneducated red-neck type of a guy who found a winning lottery ticket. He believes in karma and he is trying to make all his karma good by fixing all the bad stuff he has done in his life. Last night Earl went back to school. He found all his teachers were burnt out and had stopped caring about whether anyone learned or not. This really bothered him so he went to find out why. He heard about all the horrible things the kids had done to them over the years and decided to become a substitute teacher to help change the kids. He found out the hard way that talking to these kids didn't help. He ended up having to pull the same sort of tricks on them that they pulled on the teachers. The final point was when the teachers tried to make a kid's car play "I have a small penis", the car blew up instead. This scared the sh**out of the kids and they in turn started respecting and responding to their teachers properly.

Of course, no one with only some high school. like Earl, will be able to teach, but the point of the story was good. Teachers need respect in order to do their jobs well. There has got to be a way to do this without blowing up cars. Maybe there is even a way to scare people like Bloomberg and Klein into giving teachers the respect they deserve.