I just realized…
After I graduate, I’m gonna have to go teach in a public school. (Or “government schools,” as some right-wing nut-jobs call them. Fine; they can call every public work a “government” work. They can take government transportation down the government roads to the government park, to read a book they checked out from the government library. Oh well; side-rant over.)
Teaching at a public school is not the issue; I am getting a state credential so I can do this. But now that I’m in Vacaville, I considered the state of the local schools… and considered that it’s not necessarily a good idea to work for one of these local schools.
Vacaville schools are underfunded to the point where the Vacaville district shut down two elementary schools and fired a lot of untenured teachers. Fairfield-Suisun schools are regularly having fights between the administration and the teachers’ union. Dixon has that history of electing school board members with God complexes. And Travis schools seldom hire.
So much for job prospects in northern Solano County.
Unless I teach at Vacaville Christian Schools, and there I would return to the same problems I had with Christian schools. Which I’ll list, for your convenience.
- They don’t pay enough to live on.
- I’m surrounded by Christians. That’s annoying enough; but how am I supposed to make an impact on the larger world when all I run into are Christians?
- Parents assumed that the Christian school would magically fix their kids, and anything they screwed up by inept (or non-existent) child-rearing would just disappear.
- Teachers use the bible as the basis of classroom discipline. That is, they point out that any student behavior they dislike goes against their authority, and is therefore sin. Consequently, the kids believe God is very annoyed with them, develop no lasting relationship with him, and leave the church as soon as they’re old enough.
- This misappropriation of God’s authority also gives Christian school teachers huge God complexes, and they can become the most jealous, backstabbing gossips you’ve ever seen when they’re afraid they might lose some power to another teacher. (Fortunately, this doesn’t happen to too many teachers, but just enough of them to make life painful.)
- Awful chapel services. (Mandatory worship always suffers from too much hypocrisy. And don’t get me started on the music.)
I’ve got more gripes, but I won’t get into them. I’m sticking to public school. But I’ll have to teach at someplace outside this area. Maybe Sacramento…
Today I ran errands. It’s always odd traveling around Vacaville whenever I leave for a few months because stuff always changes. In the time since I’ve been gone, Vacaville opened its Town Hall library. So now there are two libraries in town. (We pay extra sales tax to fund them; a tax I quite approve of. Our schools may be going down the crapper, but our libraries rock.)
So one has a decent non-fiction section; the other has a decent
Back to homework…