Monster of the Day #558

One of those rare Rogain ODs.

And don’t pee on the car tires… sheeesssshhhhh…..

Nah, I’m in a suburban library. It’s close to the city, and anyone who wants to come is welcome, but no, we’re not being inundated or anything.

The strike thing is madness. The education rate in the city is abominable–something like 20% of eighth grade students can read at an eighth grade level–the teachers make an average of over $70,000 BEFORE benefits (for a nine month job), which is nearly double the average wage in the city; they pay only 3% of their health benefit cost; 70% of every new education dollar goes to retirement benefits, etc. Oh, and of course they don’t want the (particularly) bad teachers fired.

Yeah, I trained as a teacher before realizing, my senior year, during my student teaching, that I could never deal with the politics of the job. Henc how I ended up going into medicine once my kids were old enough for me to go back to school.
This sort of stuff is a significant part of the reason that we pulled the kids out of brick-and-mortar schooling after last year. When the response from the youngest’s teacher was to quote union talking points at me when I was trying to work with her on ways to get him more engaged and better-behaved with behavior modification, when she wanted me to just hurry up and drug the child already, I gave up. He is thriving now though, and the school-related behavior problems all but disappeared when he could work at his own pace.
And yes, this means poor Jamie is stuck teaching the kids at home and working full-time while the person with the actual education degree is mobilized again. Fortunately we have some good help. And even with all that mess, they are *still* doing better than they were in a brick-and-mortar.
Sorry, wasn’t trying to hijack the thread. But I think I did it anyway.

Oof, don’t even talk to me about the methods thing. I have a 5th grader who doesn’t know his multiplication tables (and I do acknowledge that that’s partially my failure because I should have made him learn them myself) because they have gone to, yet another, “new math” curriculum. They don’t teach multiplication tables because that would just be “rote memorization” when they want them to “understand” what multiplication “means”. So now they have a whole school full of kids who understand intimately how multiplication and division are supposed to work, but can’t actually *do* any to save their lives. And they only had a 33% pass rate on their annual standardized math test, surprise. We have been playing massive catch-up in that area.

Tis’ The Werewolf, a sci-fi take on the idea from Sam Katzman. Rather similar to The Vampire from about the same time.