Arthur Goldstein teaches high school students in Queens, New York.
Many of his students are new arrivals who are learning English.
Andrew Goldstein, Huffington Post - I'm blessed and privileged to be a teacher. The longer I do it, the more I appreciate it. But Andrew Cuomo has not the remotest notion of why that is.
To listen to him, you’d think I was sitting around some work site in a lawn chair with Tony Soprano. Actually, I work in a classroom for the first time in twelve years, and that’s only because my supervisor kicked me out of a trailer. I happen to know she did this only to protect a classroom she won in a never-ending building-wide turf war. I entertain no fantasies of luxury or getting rich from this job.
What keeps me going is the faces of kids, kids who come from every corner of the world. Every week they come to my classroom and I try to share the language I love with them. One of my former students is now working in our school as a math teacher. She’ll probably be my boss one day. I’m immensely proud of her, and she is the reason I am an activist.
My students are not rich. Some of them have parents who work endless hours in restaurants, small businesses, or delivering newspapers at 4 AM. One of my students told me her father was a doctor in South America, but was working here parking cars. He’s here chasing the American dream, sacrificing everything for a better life for his children.
My students can certainly park cars or work 200 hours a week for minimum wage, but that’s not why their parents brought them here. Two exits up the [Long Island Expressway] from our school is Queens College, and my students can scrimp, save, borrow and go there. After that, they can do what I do, and hopefully move out of an underclass and into a middle class....
The governor’s certainly free to talk about how complex education is, and how outraged people would be if they knew what was going on, but well-informed people know his ideas are nonsense, veritable junk science. He can go on and complain about how awful it is that we have pensions, and how terrible it is if we have job security.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me personally. I can retire today if I want to (I don’t). But when he bemoans our pensions, when he insists we be fired for junk science, when he demands merit pay, something that’s been around over a hundred years that’s never worked anywhere, he steals opportunities not only from us, but also from our children any my students.
That’s why I will go anywhere, do anything, and bring everyone I can along with me to fight Andrew Cuomo and his morally bankrupt agenda.
Andrew Goldstein, Huffington Post - I'm blessed and privileged to be a teacher. The longer I do it, the more I appreciate it. But Andrew Cuomo has not the remotest notion of why that is.
To listen to him, you’d think I was sitting around some work site in a lawn chair with Tony Soprano. Actually, I work in a classroom for the first time in twelve years, and that’s only because my supervisor kicked me out of a trailer. I happen to know she did this only to protect a classroom she won in a never-ending building-wide turf war. I entertain no fantasies of luxury or getting rich from this job.
What keeps me going is the faces of kids, kids who come from every corner of the world. Every week they come to my classroom and I try to share the language I love with them. One of my former students is now working in our school as a math teacher. She’ll probably be my boss one day. I’m immensely proud of her, and she is the reason I am an activist.
My students are not rich. Some of them have parents who work endless hours in restaurants, small businesses, or delivering newspapers at 4 AM. One of my students told me her father was a doctor in South America, but was working here parking cars. He’s here chasing the American dream, sacrificing everything for a better life for his children.
My students can certainly park cars or work 200 hours a week for minimum wage, but that’s not why their parents brought them here. Two exits up the [Long Island Expressway] from our school is Queens College, and my students can scrimp, save, borrow and go there. After that, they can do what I do, and hopefully move out of an underclass and into a middle class....
The governor’s certainly free to talk about how complex education is, and how outraged people would be if they knew what was going on, but well-informed people know his ideas are nonsense, veritable junk science. He can go on and complain about how awful it is that we have pensions, and how terrible it is if we have job security.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me personally. I can retire today if I want to (I don’t). But when he bemoans our pensions, when he insists we be fired for junk science, when he demands merit pay, something that’s been around over a hundred years that’s never worked anywhere, he steals opportunities not only from us, but also from our children any my students.
That’s why I will go anywhere, do anything, and bring everyone I can along with me to fight Andrew Cuomo and his morally bankrupt agenda.
1 comment:
of course, *if only* it was only andrew cuomo, or any handful of idiot pols...
but that ain't what is...
it is a systemic disease, fostered by the .01%, to both destroy public education, and profit off of its bones...
the dumbing-down with bullshit and lies, and the filling up with propaganda and false patriotism is working splendidly...
primarily, Empire can not withstand an educated and/or moral populace; those ideals must be perverted and destroyed for Empire to continue unchallenged...
Empire must fall.
the sooner the fall,
the gentler for all...
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