If you can make unsubstantiated claims
I've seen this bumper sticker a lot lately:
It's a nice sentiment. I like teachers, we should have more of them. They should be better trained and better paid. I also like soldiers, they help maintain our freedoms when not used in wars of aggression. I still like them even when they're not actually protecting our freedoms because they have more courage than I do and it's not their fault we have ocassionally barbarous leadership. I give them full and unwavering credit for a lot of very important things, like my safety, which I value above all else.
But they're not responsible for everything. It wasn't soldiers who invented the cotton gin [Eli Whitney] or the printing press [Guttenburg] or the computer I'm typing on [Michael Dell]. It wasn't, as much as I'd like to say it, soldiers who picked our language, and, once picked, soldiers haven't once had a hand in keeping English the national language. I'm not slighting their job performance, I'd never criticize Billy Jean King for not winning a Super Bowl. I'm sure they'd do a kickass job keeping English the national language, but so far, the opportunity has never come.
Sure, we've been in a few wars. We've even been in wars on our own soil, wars that threatened to take from us our independence. Both major wars [the Revolution and the Civil War] were fought against English speaking nations, so even though they kept us free, the soldiers didn't keep us speaking English. There was the Mexican-American [non-]war, but Mexico never even made it through the territory in dispute[Thus never really invading American soil], and most Texans were bilingual anyway. Prior to Texan independence, Mexico had asked Steven Austin to ensure that Anglos immigrating would learn Spanish, but made no attempt to force them to unlearn English. History: 3, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
Then came the Spanish-American War, started by greed and a bunch of bullshit newspaper stories that openly and falsely slandered the crumbling Spanish empire and forced Teddy--through public opinion--
World War I wasn't even remotely near us, and we were in no danger of losing our sovereignity to either the Germans or the Austro-Hungarians. There no support for the idea that either nation wanted to invade us/change our language. None. History: 4, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
World War II was a slightly closer shave, Japan bombed the hell out of us and Germany sped through Europe. Manchuria, Japan's puppet state in the 30's was forced to adopt Japanese as the official language, so for the first time we have a potential military threat to American English. But in the end, they couldn't even hang on to Eastern China--a land with almost no army that was fighting a civil war--let alone take the fight to America. The closest they got was occupying the Phillippines, which didn't really want to speak English anyway. Germany too was broken on its own ambition. The Reich really had no chance of making it to the US, even if it was successful in Europe. History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
Though we could say: If you don't live in like Canada, Madagascar or Burkina Faso and you've babel-fished this blog into French, thank a soldier. But people with the sticker probably hate the French, so: History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1
Korea [History: 7] and Vietnam [History: 8] were wars of aggression, as was the latest Gulf War [History: 9]. The first Gulf War had nothing to do with invasion of the US by a foreign entity [History: 10].
The Cold War, which I grant was very much about the overthrow of America and the end of our democracy, nonetheless posed little threat to our loss of English as a language. Let's assume that things went differently, that there actually was a war against the USSR, and that that war went badly for us and that socialist elements in the US, along with entities from abroad, were able to topple our government, as happened in many nations, the Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba among them. In none of the states referred to as satelites of Moscow did Russian become the national language. And even if, in some unbelievable scenario, the Soviets directly invaded and took over America, English would still probably be alive and well. Even in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union [as opposed to being a satelite] and has a language very similar to Russian, not even state persecution of the language could wipe it from Ukrainian lips. History: 11, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1
And the war on terrorism doesn't even count because terrorists want to blow us all to hell, in which case we wouldn't be speaking any language.
Final Score:
History: 11
Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
Sticker Buyers: -1
So there it is, 11 and 12 point victories respectively, which doesn't even cover the spread for such a moronic sentiment.
I should also say that I'm terrible at History. I've always gotten fantastically bad grades, so it takes a human of phenomenal [a factor of (Luke+n)] ignorance and stupidity to see this as anything but feeble-minded polemics.But by all means, thank a soldier for anything and everything they actually do, which is a hell of a lot.
posted by Luke @ 7:05 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
i've heard variatons of that sentiment quite a few times and i've always thought of it as less of a serious statement and more of a "zinger." Such as:
Agitated individual: "Where did America's greatness go?"
America: "I left it on your mother's bedstand. And you'd be asking that in German if etc etc etc"
-ben
It's a common formula:
If you (x), thank (a)
If you (x) in (y), thank (b)
B always being soldier [marine, etc] and A always some other underappreciated segment of society.
So this person wanted to spotlight soldiers and teachers, so they thought up something cute.
You might be interested in my newest business venture: "I (fellate) Our Troops!" yellow[ish] ribbons.
i like Christopher's idea.
Soldiers coming back from Iraq have a tricky game to play. Do they want to go with the macho, "Yeah, I went to the desert and put caps in asses" approach, or the Colonol Kurtz/Kurt Vonnegut "The horror...the horror" approach? They'll have to play it by ear if they want to get the maximum amount of pussy.
Or the maximum amount of Christopher. Maybe. Hard to tell.
-ben
Ben,
always timely. How can you not blog when you have such hilarious things to say? You owe us that at least.
Teachers are quite well paid, for a part-time job.
Problems with the assertion that teaching is only a part-time job:
1) Prep-time. Every teacher I've ever had and every one that I currently know puts in at least 4 hours of prep a day, while also working a 7 hour school day. That's 11 hours of real work, most of which isn't paid for, none of which is over-time. 11 hours (conservatively) x 180 (days in US school year) = 1980. Compared with: 52 (weeks in a year) x 30 (hours a week US gov considers full-time)= 1560, assuming no vacations.
Numbers are tricky so here: 1980 > 1560. Even if we were to move full-time to 40 hours a week, which most people work, the number would only be 2080, assuming no vacation. The average American takes 6 days of vacation a year--teachers don't get a vacation in addition to the off time of the year--so that drops the number to 2032, making teachers a week and a day short of working the equivalent of a 40 hour work week year round.
2) Even if they did come up short, the sheer importance of their job, the responsibility of preparing kids for what is a monstrously complex world is worth more than the average of 45,000 dollars yearly, with beginning teachers salaries beginning around 30. Worse, average salary growth is around 3 percent while the cost of healthcare alone rose 13 percent last year. And 45k is an AVERAGE, with the best paid teachers in rich counties artificially inflating a number that doesn't fully represent the woefully paid teachers in inner cities and other forgotten areas with poor funding.
A middle manager at some piddle-shit company will make in the 60's. I was an incompetent salesman at a company of like 10 people a year out of college with no experience and I made more than the average teacher. My point: If you're going to pay Joe fuckup 60 grand to push papers around a desk, you should see the value of paying the guy/girl who keeps your ass supplied with competent workers (talking about teachers now) at LEAST that much money. He/she is facilitating the continuation of your business.
3) The reason teachers don't work more days out of the year is not because they're lazy or because they have a good union, it's because there isn't enough funding. Not necessarily funding for salaries, but funding for all those other things, like electricity and heating. Countries that understand the importance of education--countries that are quickly outpacing us in technological fields--spend way more time in school than we do, and they can do that because they're not afraid to cough up some money as per reason (2). German and Japan are both open around 240 days a year, that's roughly 33% more book lernin' per kid per year. Most of the young teachers I know, and all the professors teaching pedagogy at Shannon's school, think 180 is way less than adequate. So it's not the teachers who don't want to work, it's us who don't want to pay them/the utility company.
Conclusion: Sorry I can't agree with you that teaching is a part time job, but even if it were it's both a) more important still than we give it credit for and b) Not the fault of Goodly Mr. History Teacher but the fault of your neighbors, the tax-shy fucktards down the block who mortgage their child's competitiveness in a cutthroat international marketplace so they can afford a Princess Cruise to St. Croix.
Luke's blog - now THERE is a full-time job. I'm pretty sure you're not being paid enough for this, mister.
But all wiseassedness aside, teachers need to have a near 24-hour obsession with their curricula to teach during the school year. They not only have to prep, they need to grade, they need to walk around with knotted stomachs over those inevitable trouble spots, they need to deal with a true success and failure balance that is not really quantifiable. Burnout is as high as it is in most any other social service field.
And the best thing is, they get to interact with mountains of bureaucratic rules, regs, and requirements, which in total lead me to my next point:
I don't think we have a tax problem. At least in California we have more than enough taxation. The problem we have is in allocation. The bulk of funding for the public school system goes into an amazingly top-heavy administrative system. Paying the mortgage and the gas bill at the average school, along with keeping the teachers paid and books in the classroom, would be a lot easier if MOST of the money were not channeled into the beehive of district-level busy-bodying.
(Sitting back down now)
don
donsense
Don, public schools in Cali go yearround right? That doesn't actually tack any days on to the school year does it? It just rearranges the holidays? Da?
Depends on the district. My kids are in traditional 9-month school, but five miles north of me they have a year-round schedule. This is a set of overlapping tracks where the student goes 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off, year round. Same number of hours altogether. I'm not sure how the teachers' time-tables figure into the schedule.
Muckdog has some seriously misinformed wacky ideas about stuff like this sometimes. He seems to have taken up the gadfly position on the blogs I link to now, in addition to my own.
Interesting factoid about schools and standards:
1) There are approximately 13000 hours of instructional time in a public education, from K-12.
2) The standards require a minimum of 19000 instructional hours.
3) As long as we keep implementing crap like NCLB, there will always be district largesse, as compliance with federal guidelines takes some serious data crunching.
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