If I was still teaching I'd be doing something like that. I don't miss it though, I was a brand-new teacher and I wasn't aware of everything I am now but I hated having to teach 8th graders out of freaking Howard Zinn. Teaching them (because the students I had certainly weren't going to be getting more history after highs school) how the US was nothing but this evil country that oppressed blacks, women, Indians, Asians; whose Founding Fathers were self-interested bigots that revolted because they didn't like taxes.
No country's perfect and ours has had a lot of issues but dammit this is a place where we don't have to worry about getting killed by secret police for saying we hate the President (yet) and where we're so well off that the really poor can still be fat. It's done and enabled a lot of good things but not like they were getting any of that side from what I was having to teach. I actually lost sleep over the junk I was having to teach.
If I was still teaching I'd be doing something like that. I don't miss it though, I was a brand-new teacher and I wasn't aware of everything I am now but I hated having to teach 8th graders out of freaking Howard Zinn. Teaching them (because the students I had certainly weren't going to be getting more history after highs school) how the US was nothing but this evil country that oppressed blacks, women, Indians, Asians; whose Founding Fathers were self-interested bigots that revolted because they didn't like taxes.
No country's perfect and ours has had a lot of issues but dammit this is a place where we don't have to worry about getting killed by secret police for saying we hate the President (yet) and where we're so well off that the really poor can still be fat. It's done and enabled a lot of good things but not like they were getting any of that side from what I was having to teach. I actually lost sleep over the junk I was having to teach.