Breakroom Conversations with Teachers

The school year is going to begin again soon, and as although I am excited to go back to doing what I love doing, I also can look forward to spending more time around liberal teachers, who dominate the education of your children, and listening to all of their theories and ideas of how the world works. It would be humorous if they weren't actively passing these ideas on to your children. For example, I'm not sure if I ever told you about the typical conversations that go on during lunch breaks with teachers. Before becoming a full-time teacher, I substitute taught for a couple years, and so had a lot of time to observe teachers during lunch breaks.

One usual topic of conversation is students who have misbehaved. According to liberal teachers, the student is not usually at fault for any misbehavior they engage in. Whereas conservative teachers would talk about discipline, leadership, and management strategies, liberals conversations about misbehaving students revolve around ethnicity, status, income level, physical features, and blame.

To these liberal teachers, the student’s bad behavior is not their fault- they are not responsible for their own actions. Instead, their poor behavior, poor test grades, etc is instead to be blamed on other teachers, society, or the testing conditions- but never the student.

The student may have some demented conservative teacher who has been preaching things like self-responsibility and discipline, and then when they go into the safe liberal teachers classroom, they act out their frustrations with the conservative teacher by hitting other students or talking back to the liberal teacher. It isn't the student's fault, and it isn't the liberal teacher's lack of management- it is the conservative teacher's fault.

In breakroom, liberal teachers talk about how it is society's fault that the student is not doing well. When liberals look at people, they break them down by race, sex, condition, sexual preference, religion, and economic status and go from there. I've heard teachers say that the reason why Johny can't read is because Johny is black, and our society does not do enough to help out black students, and we need to offer more intervention programs focuses on black students at our school, and until we do so, Johny isn't going to learn how to read. They will say this even though Johny is the only black student in school who can't read, and that Johny is also a bad kid who refuses to do his own work or help himself. I'm thinking that it is Johny's fault he can't read, but liberals want to take the responsibility out of his hands and instead blame society.

Once I heard a teacher say that the reason why Ron did so poorly on tests is because he was from a Christian family and because of this wasn't able to reason well. He didn't do well in biology class because he must have been rejecting biology because it wasn't in the bible, she would laugh, and the others would laugh too. Oh, how much fun it is for liberal teachers to mock Christians behind their backs- those silly believers!

Perhaps the favorite way for students to take responsibility away from students is to blame testing conditions for any poor tests that students take. It is never the student's fault- someone else in the room must have distracted them, the teacher must not have given the student enough time, the room must have been too cold, etc. It wasn't that the student was weak minded and lacked discipline in focus- nope, it's not their fault. They don't need to change who they are- they are fine, super people, just the way they are- weak, dumb, unruly, super happy people. And, these liberal teachers add to me in breakroom, I should not be trying to change them from who they are by forcing them to be smarter, stronger, more focused people- I'm such a mean teacher, they say.

Yes, I am looking forward to going back to teaching again, but not looking forward to more breakroom discussions that remove personal responsibility from students and blame society. It is conversations like that that make me eat my sandwich in my room.