Wanda and Donald Allen

Most of the time the show is great. However on Monday's show, Jesse made a comment that really rattled my cage. I am a retired teacher from Kentucky and have been so since 2010. I taught for over 20 years in the public school system. I belonged to the teachers' union for their legal services only. I usually disagreed with their policies and was vocal more than once. What I can't abide is someone saying we work banker's hours or that we get 3 months off in the summer. I don't know how it is in your state, but in Kentucky we had to teach a certain number of days per school year. We would start mid or early August and depending on how many snow days we had, we would get off the first or second week of June. Then we would start with the endless inservice days. Sometimes they would last a week and if we were lucky it might only last 3 days and we would get a long week end. Then it would start all over again. By this time it would be early July and we might get a couple of weeks off before we would start a 2 week inservice to get ready for the next year. After that, we would be expected to spend at least a week preparing for our students to be welcomed into a bright learning environment, So Jesse, most teachers don't get 3 months off in the summer. Most get maybe 2 or 3 weeks off of interrupted time. Also, many teachers spend much of of their own money to buy extras for their classroom. I was one of the many dedicated teachers who would get to school at 6 or 7 in the morning and leave at 9 or 10 at night. Please Jesse, don't lump all teachers together because of the rotten ones or because of misconceptions you may have about the time we spend working. I would also like to add, there is politics in the schools and the teachers are the low man on the totem pole. First you start with our corrupt National Teachers' Union. Next, it trickles to each states' union. Then there is each districts' Board of Education. Many of whom do not even require a high school diploma. Next in line is the superintendent who usually makes a six figure salary. The superintendent doesn't even have to be from that school district. The Board of Education hires him or her. You then have various other department heads that make up the rest of the staff working at the Board office. Finally, you have the princpal at each school and believe me, there is competition between the schools. The newspapers publish test scores for each school at the end of the year. If your school doesn't improve from the previous year's test scores, you are considered a school in crisis. If you are considered a school in crisis, outsiders come in and put everything you do under a microscope. They set goals and tell you how to teach. Each child is supposed to be taught the same way and expected to reach a certain goal by a certain time. As a special needs teacher, I saw how unrealistic that approach was. All children learn in different ways. They seemed to be trying to fit all learning styles to one and that just won't work! You can't fit a square peg into a round hole. They tried to tell me to take my special needs children into the regular classroom and teach them the same way and expect them to keep up. This is where I locked horns with them. I had to have a special degree in order to teach the special needs. I knew what these children needed and it wasn't being pigeonholed. I ended up retiring with a disability. There's more to this ,if you're interested. I can be found in the Liberty, Kentucky phone book. Your's most sincerely, Wanda Allen