Has American Education Ever Really Been That Good?

In any event, he's the index patient for "What's Wrong with American Schools."

My ETS Certificates of Excellence say otherwise.

Everyone has one of those.

It's not your ability to take tests that is the problem. The problem is the information you choose to share with your students - assuming it's anything like the stuff you say here.

No they don't.

I literally have three of them.

I have four.

Liar.

I am.

Not me.

There's zero chance of me ever moving to Arkansas, so the chance of Dayton ever teaching my kids is practically nil.

But there's a chance that Arkansas can stop being Arkansas and start being a place that isn't nothing more than the butt of a joke if people like Dayton stop teaching other people's children. Surely it's worth that chance.

But.

I do plan to be a part of the group that determines history textbook use and methodology one day.

I've presented my ideas on teaching about the Cold War to groups of Social Studies teachers before and they universally agreed that my approach was appealing and worthy of study.

So perhaps I will be able to influence what your kids learn.

Unless you can do all that before the 2013/14 school year, you won't.

And it has less to do with you than with your shitty state.

The state that still produced one of the most popular Democratic presidents since World War Two.

And he was a product of the public education system in Arkansas as well.

Only an hour from where I went to school in fact.

I can't stand Bill Clinton, so that's not going to win me over.

When you're searching for ways to defend a state's education system and you end up citing the same one successful person twice, that strongly suggests that the example is an exception rather than the rule.

Wesley Clark.

No, for the same reason I don't worry about ever seeing the words Dayton Kitchens and elected official in the same sentence. Same reason you have to try and silence people in discussions instead of actually winning the debate.

You have no idea at all how people work, nor the systems they create. I can tell you WANT to understand it. All those books on leadership you read, but you really have no idea. And without understanding people, without understanding the systems they create, you will never have any influence over anything.

Sorry Dayton but Arkansas has signed up on common core. Our curriculum has gone national, you won't teach what isn't going to be tested. Well...maybe after the testing you could revisit it.

Poor kids.

Who said anything about fair, you moronic fuck? Is it fair for the rest of a class to be dragged down by the one or two fuckwits who aren't there to learn?

To Bear:

As one of those kids that was there to learn, it was definitely irritating to have to sit around in a class all day and have the teacher pretty much spend all his/her time on the trouble makers and attention seekers.

Perfect example is my sixth-grade teacher, who by the time I had him was pretty much the guy everyone sent their troubled students to. He spent a lot of time trying to play Boot Camp Sergent-wannabe to the numerous amount of students that were lazy or disruptive, and spent so much time trying to [-]do the job our parents should be doing[/-] make productive human beings that we didn't learn as much as we should have and our class had the lowest middle school placement scores he'd seen in his career to that point.

He was (and still is) always available to his students, so much so that his first wife left him over it, but he's gotten a lot of kids that came from such situations that Tafkats described that overcame and have made successes of themselves.

Basically, I think it more boils down to the desire to learn more than the ability, and between the parents and teachers one should support the other in awaking that.

This is completely true. Without revealing information or details you only have to have a light read of his diary thread, and his posts elsewhere, to know this. Dayton has zero diplomacy skills, a complete inability to work/cooperate with others and is totally unable or unwilling to see the point of view of anyone else but himself (which, in turn, makes him completely unable to employ self reflection and assess why he may have made enemies of people).

Reading a couple of pages up is quite astonishing. The sheer nerve of the man to accuse a complete stranger of messing with his personal life, a foreigner no less and someone with no history of trolling, without any shred of proof whatever, left me utterly incredulous.

Dayton lives with a paranoid fixation that the world is out to get him and is completely oblivious to any actions of his own that may have contributed to his repeated misfortunes over the years.

He is about as far away from politician material as can be, and frankly shouldn't be a anywhere near any career path that carries any level of responsibiliy, especially not teaching.