What are your options when the state gives your children lousy teachers?

By David McElroy · February 19, 2012

Most of us had lousy teachers at some point. I had a physics teacher who absolutely didn’t understand the subject she was teaching, but she was politically active, so she ended up as president of the state teacher union. I had a chemistry teacher who couldn’t speak louder than a mouse and couldn’t control his class, so I learned nothing. But none of them compare to the basketball coach I had for math in the seventh grade.

I lived on the beach in Pensacola, Fla., that year. (It sounds nicer than it is. All the sand gets really tiresome.) The beach is in the Pensacola city limits, so the beach kids were bused into the city. Every day, our bus drove us through a suburb with good schools and deposited us at terrible schools — filled with bad teachers and unmotivated students from poor homes. It was my only experience in a majority-black inner-city school. It felt strange being one of only two white boys in the seventh grade.

My math teacher was a really likable guy, but he was a basketball coach — and he didn’t care that much about math. Even though we were in the seventh grade, they were just starting long division. Since I’d been in pretty good schools until them — and had already been taught basic algebra at home — the class seemed like a joke. I was bored.

When the coach found out that I knew more about math than he did — and I admitted how bored I was — we made a deal. For a six-week grading period, he turned the class over to me. It was at the beginning of basketball season, so he used the time to prepare for basketball and he handed me the teacher edition of the textbook. For six weeks, I taught the class. I was much tougher than he was, but grades went up. Since we didn’t get caught, it was actually a very fun experience.

What do you do when your local government — with the collusion of teacher unions — gives your kids this kind of teacher? Even worse, what do you do if you realize that the entire government school system is giving your kids an education that’s radically different from what you want them to have? What are your options?

I’ve happened to write about schools a couple of times this week, and that prompted a conversation with a friend about the issue. He has a daughter who’s about to start kindergarten. She’s already come home from her Pre-K classes having been taught things that my friend sees as pure political propaganda. But how does he explain this to a 5-year-old without destroying all of the authority and credibility of her teachers? (And what she was taught is accepted as mainstream gospel anyway, although he knows better, since he’s a historian.)

My friend would like to keep his daughter out of the school. He’d like her to be in a curriculum more in line with his own beliefs, but home-schooling isn’t an option for him. He and his wife both work and they don’t feel competent to teach their daughter without a lot of support and help anyway. They live in a town of only about 3,500 in a very conservative area. In his town, the only home-schoolers he’s ever even heard of are a few ultra-conservative families at a small “backwoods” church nearby.

I know that there are excellent teachers out there. I had some who were incredibly good along the way. Lois Dutton — who was my high school teacher for all of my algebra, trigonometry and pre-calculus classes — was an eccentric genius who I loved dearly. And I just discovered a small Facebook group dedicated to the late Dr. Dan Pound, a brilliant political science professor at the University of Alabama, who was the most difficult teacher I ever had, but one who forced me to think. I’ve personally known teachers who have very high academic standards and love their students and make a difference in their lives. I know they exist. The problem isn’t that there aren’t any good teachers. The problem is that we have a lousy, monopolistic system that’s controlled by poor management.

So my friend pays for his local government schools whether he uses them or not, but they don’t supply the kind of educational or social environment he’d like for his daughter. So what can he do?

I don’t have any good answers, but I told him that I have smart, creative and educated readers who might have ideas that I’ve never thought of. So I’m asking for your help. What options do you see for someone who wants his child to have a good education in a tiny conservative town, but who doesn’t trust the schools the government provides?

What advice should we give my friend about his daughter? Please respond in the comments if you have any thoughts about it.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

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A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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