Corruption by dem governors. Thats the risk of having an all powerful dem state machine running the blue state politics.
There's certainly a lot of merit to that and no one should discount it, along with cyclical party swings, but I remember in the mid-2000s it being floated that a lot of states opt for Republican leadership out of a conflation we often make with leadership akin to
Autodidact's big daddy theory. Republicans running for Governor can often tout "business principles" and other such folly to constituents.
9/11 happened when I happened to go to Catholic school for one year, my freshman year of high school. We heard about it and they had it on the TVs at lunch but that was it. They just had us go about the day as usual. Our asshat bio teacher was even like, "One of my relatives works at the Pentagon but we need to go about our day as usual and continue class."
Would have learned a lot more if we were able to hunker down and follow the news.
I'll always agree with the way my high school, regardless of its failings otherwise, committed to being open with us. We turned the TVs on just prior to the second plane hitting, so we all saw that shit, and the entire day every classroom was tuned in. The following day was then all about every classroom having in-depth and lengthy conversations about the circumstances, the state of the country, etc. It was a really remarkable and healthy way to approach the situation. To again contrast my previous high school, my best friend from those days and since said that they were left completely in the dark. Everyone knew something bad had happened but no one in the school administration was sharing details and the day was expected to be a normal school day. I still find that reprehensible.
In short, I think they trivialize the profession. Not everyone can teach, and the discipline itself requires extensive education and preparation to be effective. You cannot go from non-teacher to teacher in five weeks, and even though teachers should grow and improve on the job, you shouldn't be learning the basics (e.g., how to write a lesson plan) on the job. Again, many TFA teachers nail it and become valuable members of the school community. The program itself just gives me pause.
Oh god, learning to teach while teaching.
During my first semester in my MA one of my three courses was essentially pedagogy. Mind you, those of us in that course were tasked with teaching college comp that same semester. A lucky few of us had previous tutoring or teaching experience but that whole situation was a clusterfuck. In fact, we weren't even given the textbooks we were to teach from or any other materials until our orientation week, just one week prior to entering the classroom, and they were updating lesson plans and schedules up to the last minute. You'd form a rudimentary syllabus or lesson plan and five minutes later they'd change the whole thing on you. That's not to mention the deeply unorthodox way my department handled comp courses, which is more complicated than I think anyone wants to delve into.
I basically winged my entire course that semester, which was oddly healthy for me in some ways but was a real baptism by fire that I saw hurt and dissuade a lot of promising young instructors that needed more structure and time.
I'm similarly white and educated and damn lucky - a fact that was never more obvious than when I first lived here on a H1 visa, there was a typo on my computerized records that meant younger less experienced customs agents weren't familiar with the flag or how to clear it, so sometimes I'd be sent to the crying room for secondary screening. The rooms were invariably filled with crying older women of Latin and East Asian origin- often waiting for a relative to come save them.
The agents would take one look at me and stick my passport at the front of the queue because they assumed my paperwork was going to be quicker and easier to resolve.
But even on the fifteenth or sixteenth occasion, I'd be terrified and helpless feeling - I can only imagine what those (usually) women were going through.
This was back in the day too, when things were less intense.
Immigration to the USA is difficult and stressful and expensive. And even then,I never resented illegal immigrants because anyone with eyes can see that they're an essential part of our service and agricultural industries. I couldn't walk a mile in their shoes.
You want a ten dollar avocado or a thousand dollar motel room, then keep building that wall.
Oof, "the crying room" is just such an evocatively depressing phrase. Is that a general slang or your own creation?
The one bright point to the shit my professor saw was that we could integrate a lot of it into our lessons since we were teaching American Lit. 1865-1945, with a heavy emphasis on marginalized communities during that time period. Made for quite a week the time his citizenship oath coincided with our discussions, with primary documents, on the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The ~~~Enlightened Europeans~~~ will continue to tell us the Democrats would be center-right in any other country/America doesn't have a real left wing/America is backward, but look what happened to their welfare states and supposed "values" the moment they got an influx of brown people.
At the old place it was always very eye-opening when Roma topics inevitably crashed and burned. The worst part of those was seeing such rote, stereotypical racist language and tropes bandied about as verifiable truths by people who would turn around and enter topics about American racism to pillory the US. And when called out for their racist words and actions the replies always read, "Well, it's different here." No, it isn't.
