Apropos of nothing in particular...

I'm sittin' here bein' all Deep and Thoughtful and Stuff because it's easier than working, which is what I'm supposed to be doing. Blog-crawling with one hand over a keyboard and the other wrist-deep in a pizza plate full of crackers with melted cheddar. Am I getting highbrow, or what?

Anyway, what with one thing or another I come up with this WaPo article from a couple of weekends ago, written by a lady named Sarah Fine. She's explaining the Deep, Thoughtful reasons she dropped out of teaching after four years, which is her choice and wasn't any of my business until she made it so. The horrifying travails of public schools are a vague interest of mine as I sit in my secluded lair which often, given a satellite connection, seems like a balcony seat at the fall of western civilization: I get to watch, but am far enough away to stay uninvolved in the matter. And from that elevated prospect I'm trying to decide why this lady is pissing me off.

Maybe it started with the title:

Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can't Stay.

I mean if she can't stay, then maybe schools don't need teachers like her so much as some other kind of teachers. Or if schools really do need etc., then maybe she should re-think leaving. I dunno. But I've a feeling that, no matter the possible negative interpretations, self-aggrandizement is about to ensue.

When she gets done with the Deep and Dramatically Thoughtful set-up for her article and finally gets to reasons for the decision, they seem pretty straightforward to me:

I just couldn't take it anymore, I explain. I describe what it was like to teach students such as Shawna, a 10th-grader who could barely read and had resolved that the best way to deal with me was to curse me out under her breath. I describe spending weeks revising a curriculum proposal with my fellow teachers, only to find out that the administration had made a unilateral decision without looking at it. I describe how it became impossible to imagine keeping it up and still having energy for, say, a family.

I can understand why she'd want to bitch about that: She probably spent a lot of time in some school of education, then found good reason to burn out after only four years. I'd be pissed - though it seems she might have taken a better look before that last step. And I'm still not sure why this is any of my business - or why the Washington Post found it printable. Then she starts bitching about her friends and neighbors:

"Why teach?" they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: "When I tell people I want to do it, they're like, 'Really? You really still want to do that?' " Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. "I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them," she says. "In the world we live in, teaching doesn't cut it."

And at this point we have a bit of a falling out, Sarah and me. Due to various factors, I graduated public school in the twelfth institution I ever attended. I met a helluva lot of school teachers. And I'm sorry - though I remember a few fondly, by far the majority were forgettable, second-rate people, perfectly suited to the second-rate profession in which they found themselves stuck. In fact, so many were so interchangeably alike that I've long thought the profession - or possibly the identically-specialized schools where they matriculate before being inflicted on kids, self-selects for mediocrity. Hell, Sarah - maybe you bailed after four years because you're too smart to fit in. Maybe your apparent failure is really an achievement.

Or...maybe not.

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

In their book "Millennials Rising: the Next Great Generation," sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss characterize the members of my generation as "engaged," "upbeat" and "achievement-oriented." This is why we become teachers. We seek to challenge ourselves, and we excel at pursuing our goals. Howe and Strauss go so far as to call us a "hero generation." Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued.

President Obama also casts himself as a believer in people my age. "They have become a generation of activists possessed with that most American of ideas -- that people who love their country can change it," he proclaimed in April.

The president is right: My generation does seem to care a lot about Important Stuff. We put our lives on hold to canvass for the causes we believe in. We volunteer like our hair is on fire. When it comes to teaching, however, this fire only burns for so long.

Yeah. Um...Sarah? At some point in their development, most people really do stop caring, or at least talking, about the supposed characteristics of 'their generation' because generation to generation most groups of people are really pretty much alike. What matters are the individual differences, and you might want to start working on yours. I don't know who these fellows Neil Howe and William Strauss are. I'm sure they're very smart, having written a book and all. But they're still full of shit, at least in the snippets you quoted. In any generation, some members will be "engaged," "upbeat" and "achievement-oriented," and other won't. Making such statements about a generation as a whole is a sure sign of having achieved maximum fecal capacity. There is No Such Thing as a "hero generation." Moreover, to put it mildly, the fact that President Obama said something doesn't make it significant, or even true. In fact, often the opposite is indicated.

Now, to be fair I looked up some of the linked references in Sarah Fine's article, such as Teach For America and the (so help me I'm not making this up) Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which is located in Washington D.C., which fact alone probably tells you everything you need about the quality of the teaching experience. Sarah turns out to be a nice, progressive girl, taught in a nice, progressive college program, and then decanted into the rancid stew of Mordor-by-the-Potomac educational bureaucracy. Quitting is probably the most positive thing she's ever done with her life. I hope now that she's published her article she can quit moaning, get over it, and move on.