Last Friday we were at the Shabbat table of two LAUSD teachers, one retired, the other aging out in December.
In the fumes of the Vergara ruling a fortnight ago, a natural question arose. What proportion of bad teachers have they observed in their cumulative 63 years?
Our hostess was quick to reply: 10 percent.
That means at least 35 sour apples are flourishing in Culver City’s 350-teacher community.
In the fifth-dimension California teacher world of lifetime employment after an 18-month trial period, that kind of refreshing, blurting-out candor leads to heart attacks, swooning bodies with shocked forearms dramatically raised to shocked foreheads, and cement-strong denials in the rawest language this side of ISIS.
At least our hostess was more honest about her fraternity than any teacher or administrator I have encountered in Culver City.
The most bad teachers anyone — even privately — will concede is “one or two.”
Teaching is mankind’s final outpost where every applicant or aspirant is believed to nurturingly bathe, nightly and morningly, in the purest waters available on the planet.
Whether in or out of the classroom, they luxuriate in rarified moral splendor, the type allowed to be inhaled only by those chosen few who seek to stamp out world rot by educating young minds – as long, that is, as they are guaranteed lifetime employment
The worst of the bad teachers are gently tapped into a soft-landing 48-month net. They are permitted four years to acclimate themselves to the notion they might not fit into classrooms where eager, innocent minds vulnerably drink in their unchallenged wisdom.
Outright firing of the bad, as most of America’s English speakers were told this month by Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu, is impossible unless the dope kills two or more people in the presence of at least 24 alert witnesses above the age of 24.
Otherwise, the faulty teacher has four full years to muddy the minds, to roadblock the growth of our precious children – every single day.
