I always appreciate it when a cartoonist allows me to vent about something without violating the Prime Directive. Thank you, Mr. Fitz, for allowing me to be positive about this insider take, rather than give in to the temptation to run, and then rip down, a bad cartoon on the topic.
Here's the deal: First of all, he's right.
There are parents who are wonderfully cooperative and helpful, but there are also helicopter parents who need to unclench, back off and let things happen.
And then there are the parents a teacher very much needs to be in contact with but who can't be found.
Neither is "typical," and the mix varies widely from district to district, but the helicopter parents and the never-there parents are two extremes whose demands take way too much energy away from the central mission of teaching, and from the majority of kids who are in the middle.
Which makes today's Mr. Fitz a very funny strip, because, as a teacher himself, he's got a "Willie and Joe" approach that, like Mauldin's cartoons, is intended not to amuse the folks back home or to please the brass but to share a laugh and some of the pain with the soldiers in the trenches.
This stands in stark contrast to the frequent, and frequently shared, "In My Day" cartoons about how, by golly, in my day, parents didn't complain to the teacher if their kids got in trouble or brought home bad grades. They gave their kid hell and backed up the school. Not like today.
There are two problems with these In My Day cartoons:
To begin with, they appeal to burned-out teachers who probably don't need encouragement to feel that their lives suck and that everyone is picking on them. And, yes, there is bizarre irony in whining about how everybody whines these days.
It is critical to note the difference between Mr. Fitz's empathy with his fellow teachers and these litanies of "it's so unfair."
There was never a hint in Mauldin's work that Willie and Joe were not willing to soldier on. It was Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose who kept up the constant chorus of "poor GIs, you are so mistreated."
So that's one problem with those "In My Day" cartoons.
But there's another, bigger problem:
They are total and complete bullshit.
The notion that, in the olden days, parents didn't complain about Poor Misunderstood Innocent Johnny to teachers and principals and school boards and anyone else who would listen is Simply. Not. True.
As the son of a school board president, as the father of a teacher, as someone who has worked with educators for the past 20 years, I can personally vouch for the enduring presence in the system of complaining parents -- and their innocent angel-faced children -- over at least the last half century.
This is not to suggest that teachers are invariably correct. I've made a few trips to the principal's office as both student and parent and sometimes it was righteous and sometimes it was not.
But Mr. Fitz is as hard -- perhaps harder -- on incompetent teachers as he is on faceless, clueless bureaucrats, overbearing administrators, slacker students or counterproductive parents.
As was another teacher-cartoonist some years ago.
Before he did Lucky Cow, Mark Pett tested the waters with a strip called "Mr. Lowe," based on his stint as a classroom teacher. One memorable character was Ms Jade, whom the rookie teacher here discusses with his principal.
I actually had a similar conversation with a school superintendant who said each administrator has a certain small group of teachers he can't wait to see retire and get out of his school. He described it as making marks on the wall like a prisoner, counting down the days.
Thing is, despite all the talk about how you can't get rid of an incompetent teacher, you can. But they have to do something more than simply bring everyone down and be a blight on the atmosphere of the school.
That's pretty much true everywhere in every profession in every industry, by the way. If nothing else, the person you would most love to get out of the building is the person most likely to come back with a wrongful termination lawsuit.
And, unfortunately, the clever solutions come up with for schools by the union-busting privatizers are so badly targeted that they scatter and splatter shrapnel indiscriminately among the faculty, including the good, the bad and the average.
And how could it be otherwise? After all, these "evaluation systems" are based on raising test scores -- a goal whose most triumphant successes seem to have all involved some finagling by administrators -- and whose clumsy, soulless pedagogy was, in previous decades, filed under the headings of "drill and kill" or "death by ditto sheet."
As in any profession, teachers are more dismayed than outsiders by the incompetents within their ranks because of the damage they do to public perception, as well as their toxic effect within their individual organizations.
But of course, as Aaron McGruder notes here, it's important that we uphold our standards. That's really the key to fixing our broken system.
In my day, we had standards and all students lived up to them. That's why our schools were so much better in my day.
(In fact, here's a short documentary from 1960
about what schools were like in my day.)
Speaking of bringing everyone down and being a blight on the school, it's pretty hard to get rid of an administrator, too. Especially when he's part of the Old Boys Network.
In other words, some of those principals counting down my days had no idea anyone would feel that way about them. But plenty of teachers did.
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 01/03/2014 at 04:25 PM
I knew a lot of very good superintendents and principals, truly inspiring leaders. But.
But I did come across one situation that sounds like a Dilbert strip: The board appointed a committee of teachers to interview prospective principals. The teachers recommended one candidate as their #1 choice, named another as #2 and then said they didn't like the third finalist at all.
Oh, you guessed the ending?
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 01/03/2014 at 08:00 PM
As I used to tell the kids, you don't have to have ESP to be able to figure out what's gonna happen next around here!
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 01/04/2014 at 06:12 PM