Dear Editor
Re: Teaching has changed and rightfully so, Letters to the editor, Opinion, Oct. 21.
The teacher writer says: “What other differences were there in 1956? Fewer autistic children, children with ADHD, children who don’t speak English, children from single -parent families, over-scheduled, anxiety-ridden children, children damaged by cyberbullying, children addicted to their smart phones and game consoles, sleep-deprived children staying up late at night watching YouTube/ social media, and children lured by gang-and party drugs, children were not raised on a diet of genetically-modified food stuffed with additives and hormones.”
And, of course, lack of corporal punishments, parents (and kids perhaps) calling police, taking matters to the lawyer, and so on and so forth, blaming is endless.
But aren’t these all the teachers’ own making? Especially by throwing out “their” student with the non-zero-grading system, keeping “poisonous” things such as calculators at school, tainting school grounds with anything that goes by social trends, blaming everybody else, including the students’ and their own parents, but themselves? Where is their responsibility as teachers, to keep the learning environment sane?
As a parent myself, am I to blame them? Absolutely not, but they have to go back to their own rotten education and fix it from there, for their own sanity, to be “a teacher.”
The teachers should understand that blaming doesn’t take anyone anywhere, but keep working, even harder, to find the right place, to start within.
Sylvia Gung, Burnaby
