I read Larry Moses’s column, No One Asked Me But… (The Progress Mar. 27, 2024) with great interest.
Quickly, I wouldn’t trust the CCSD to successfully investigate what day followed Monday. I just wish the $150,000 earmarked to find a new Superintendent was to be used to find replacements for the lot of them.
Of more interest was the discussion about teachers. I received a degree in Education from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1970 and taught in the Milwaukee School District in total for three years before leaving in disgust over what was going on in the schools.
My major area was Secondary Education, which one of my professors told me was an accurate description as I would soon find that education was secondary to everything I would encounter in the school system.
Keep in mind that this was over 50 years ago. A large majority of my friends and acquaintances who went into teaching also left the profession soon after being exposed to school administrators and school boards, but most of all from teacher unions.
From my prospective, things have continued to deteriorate at an alarming level.
I have no doubt that the description of “real teachers” in the column applies to some in the profession. But I fear that the numbers are very low.
Our daughter graduated from a public high school in California and it was appalling how much of a teacher’s job my wife had to do at home with her to ensure that she had a basic education. Her reading comprehension, writing and math skills were not acquired in public school, and it wasn’t until her third year in college that she became proficient in these areas. Left to her own devices, she never would have graduated from college.
In her career, she became a person the company turned to for her comprehension and writing skills because she became adept at those.
She is now a mother herself with a five-year-old son attending a CCSD pre-school. He will begin kindergarten in August.
We live in Mesquite and are told the local elementary school is decent but the middle and high schools are terrible. We are looking for private/parochial schools for the boy. It is evident from parents in this area that there aren’t a lot of “real teachers” here.
Will Venski
Mesquite
