I taught high school math for one year, so on reading the title of this post, I said to myself, “From experience, no I cannot.” Teaching is a draining and mostly thankless job, even if it is gratifying to be able to get paid for trying to make the world a better place in some small way.

This is pure opinion, but I think the biggest problems with our high schools are:
1. Administrations try to run school like businesses but lack the education to do so correctly. This leads to problems like the microscopes you mentioned. They try to cut costs without actually doing cost benefit analyses and their assumptions about the impacts of various cost-cutting changes are often not realistic.
2. School administrations are largely unaccountable. If a student or parent complains, it will almost certainly be about a teacher, someone who actually has to spend several hours a day in front of students whether or not they want to. From an administrator’s point of view, punishing the teacher makes the problem go away. The principal at my school ran it like his own little fiefdom until the school board voted not to renew his contract mid-year (which is some indication of how frustrated everyone was with this guy) and by most accounts he caused far more trouble than he ever resolved.
3. Our culture promotes active disrespect for teachers and education in general. Culture in the U.S.A. is anti-intellectual, particularly youth culture. Only nerds want to learn things and improve themselves. This is reinforced by parents who say things like “those who can’t do, teach.” And of course, there’s the strain of conservative thinking that attacks teachers and teacher unions at every opportunity, insisting that all teachers are lazy parasites living off the dole.

On that last bit: in my admittedly limited teaching experience, most teachers were working their fingers to the bone to teach their students, often working against the administration and some of the loonier parents to make things happen in the classroom. The administrator of my department, who also taught, came into work sick for a whole week before passing out, getting taken to the hospital, and being diagnosed with walking pneumonia. Lazy parasites don’t put out that kind of superhuman effort to teach kids about math.

Then the same jerks who made our culture the way it is ask why our schools are doing so poorly. Just compare our country to one in which education is great — Finland, Germany, Japan…the difference is that those countries have a culture of respect for education and educators.

Anyway, thanks for being a cool dude with a cool blog.

That’s an impressively backwards volunteer policy by your district (and state). In my state there are checks but they are free.

In my experience the greatest hindrance to volunteering in schools were the teachers and administrators. I spent a significant time volunteering before starting a teaching program. It was part of the requirement for the program but mostly to determine whether I really wanted to do this long term. It was very difficult to get into many schools. They said they wanted volunteers but in practice didn’t follow through. I did manage to find a few teachers that wanted volunteers but they were few and far between.

I’m just about to start my student teaching/practicum in high school science.

I also learned that I wasn’t interested in the FFA program and Ag-Ed teachers are not needed in every school. The Ag teachers in this state are a rather inclusive group and I just didn’t fit in. The standard Ag tests for our state really sucked–so many poorly worded questions, wrong answers and very bad grammar. Yuck.

About the background check, my county does it free for parents and, in my case, grandparents, I don’t know about for those who might visit for something like this. It is getting much harder to get others in the classroom. Permissions galore, planning and then background checks.

I am a middle school teacher, and volunteers usually do make our jobs easier.

However, it is now district policy that all adults that come into contact with the students for a length of time, including volunteers, have to be background checked and fingerprinted. While I appreciate the concern for our kid’s safety, our volunteer list has nearly vanished. The background check and fingerprinting are time-consuming and costly – none of it is paid for by the schools. The volunteers must foot the bill.

Gone are the days of parents helping out at school or retirees coming back to aide…