A Liberal
Dose
October 20,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“Vote to
support our schools, our teachers, and our kids”
Late October, which means a young man’s fancy is
wending toward the great Fall Classic…yes, election day. There is a lot riding
on this midterm election, some of which I will discuss in coming weeks. For the
most part, though -at least on a national scale -most of those decisions will
hinge on decisions made in other states. But we still have a chance to make a
big difference here in Tennessee.
I have to say, as scary as things have looked in the
last few years, I have recently been seeing reason for optimism here in my
little home town. I am encountering more people who are tired of the vitriol
and the full-scale ideological warfare and who are willing to listen to what
the other person has to say, and are then willing to once again “disagree
without being disagreeable.” I have met more people who have expressed, once
again, a desire to support the best person for the job rather than the one who
has the right letter beside their name on the polls.
That’s why, this week, I am writing about something
that I think a big chunk of our citizens agree on, and with which we can help
make a difference.
I’m talking about education, and about treating our
public-school teachers with appreciation and respect.
They have a hard job. They have to control a classroom
of energetic kids, stretch their supplies to the limit and augment them out of
their own pocket (which doesn’t have much in it), deal with sometimes unreasonable
or angry -or absent and apathetic -parents, and spend their off-hours preparing
classes and grading tests and homework. People talk about them having the
summer off, but they spend a good deal of that time preparing for the coming
school year. Plus, during the other nine months they work 12 or more hours per
day, so it balances out to a year-round job anyhow.
And, more and more since the turn of this 21st
century, they have to do it all with the state government interfering left and
right, adding to their burdens while cutting their budgets. At present, this
includes a governor and a state legislature that wants to tell teachers how to
do their jobs, including how to teach about the things they went to college to
learn how to teach. What they can talk about, what they can say, how they can
say it. It is a legislature that decides -for every school in the state -not
only what books they can have in their library, usually with very little if any
knowledge about said books, but that has decreed that teachers have to go
through the libraries in their own classrooms and catalogue every book in them
by hand -on top of their already maxed-out schedules, without falling behind. In
some cases we’re talking about a couple of hundred books. More and more teachers
are finding it easier to just… not have books in their classrooms at all.
And the governor. We have a governor that wants to
pull funding from already suffering public schools -including rural ones like
ours -to set up private charter schools at taxpayer expense that can get around
state standards, to advance a particular political agenda. He brought in a
private company -from Michigan -to set up those schools, and the guy in charge
said the most reprehensible, insulting things about our public teachers. And to
this day Bill Lee has not condemned those statements. On the contrary, there is
a move as of this writing for a state commission Lee set up to overrule the
many local school boards in Tennessee who voted against that company’s schools,
and in favor of our teachers. Let that sink in.
OVERRULE YOUR SCHOOL BOARDS.
When you vote for governor, don’t just go blindly down
the ticket. Remember all these things, and vote accordingly.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
