it’s actually pretty easy because I have read it and it’s crank shit. https://t.co/AGbZQIgL5v
— William B. Fuckley (@opinonhaver) June 1, 2023
My mom was studying for her NYC teaching certificate when I was in high school, so I got to read Deschooling Society when it was the new hot theory that was going to change teaching forever. Not a fan, because that mixture of high jargon and airy whimsy did not appeal. Although it was preferable to Summerhill, because while I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be alone in an elevator with either author, I’m pretty sure the worst Illich would’ve done was yammer at me until my sanity snapped. (Even at that age, I knew better than to trust a man who talked as much and as enthusiastically about ‘unleashing the natural sexual curiosity of the young child’ as A.S. Neil.)
There was a whole backwash of Defund the Schools!!! enthusiasm among the DSA-rose / anarcho-socialist twitterarti this week, possibly related to the end of the school year and its consequences. Or so I perceived it, from the undercurrent of How can it be so hard for someone with all the correct socialist credentials to obtain academic credit? individual butthurt…
whatever you say, kiddo! fight the power! down with homework! i listened to alice cooper when i was your age too
— lauren (@NotABigJerk) May 30, 2023
If as a child there wasn’t a part of you whispering that it’d be cool to stay up until 2 AM watching cartoons, eating pizza, and playing video games, you’re a cop no matter how much you drone on about abolishing the police.
— Starfish PhDing in Plankton and Salmon Studies (@IRHotTakes) June 1, 2023
the “no bedtimes, no chores” subsect of leftiest thought strikes again i see
— 𝕯𝖆𝖓 (who’s to say) 🍻⚾️🐦⬛ (@DanMaynardII) June 1, 2023
Kids also don’t focus their curiosity on all subjects.
Maybe you could run an economy with 90% of the workforce who mostly just know about trains and dinosaurs. But I’m skeptical.
— Benjamin Danard 🇺🇦 (@BenjaminDanard) June 1, 2023
Anti-public education discourse is very similar to anti-vaccination discourse, the product of a far more poor and hostile world fading from living memory, which unfortunately is not te case for the majority of the world population
— ManuelDF (@DetoniFlores) June 1, 2023
basically, schools are like subway trains & all this other shit is the hyperloop: the conventional solution is really hard to get right, requires lots of resources and coordination, and is still, when you take tradeoffs and constraints involved seriously, clearly better. https://t.co/s5sVpg3e4J
— William B. Fuckley (@opinonhaver) June 1, 2023
I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a horizontalist pedagogy that didn’t end up with everyone twiddling their thumbs waiting for someone to help them understand something beyond the basics
— WorldWithoutEnd (@numetalofficial) June 1, 2023
A later tweet includes an argument that reminds me of radical queer arguments against marriage, which is basically “yeah sure you’re probably right, but in practical terms that’s meaningless. Let’s talk about solutions to problems we can address.”
— Airship Chronos says TRANS RIGHTS!🇺🇦 (@CooperDoyle1) June 1, 2023
And since there’s a spume of UNSCHOOLING blather from the far-far-Left, Horseshoe Theory demands professional point-bigot Bethany Mandel test the market for a new trend:
Whereas spending all day with your mom perfectly simulates adult life. https://t.co/2Xi7c0oQ8B
— Slope Slipperer (@agraybee) June 2, 2023
Someone told me that sometimes one homeschooling parent will teach multiple homeschooled kids. That’s school. You invented a school that can’t be integrated, congratulations.
— Slope Slipperer (@agraybee) June 2, 2023
look, there are tradeoffs on this kind of thing. there are good reasons (and also a lot of bad ones) we no longer do busing.
but diversity is good, c.p., and if you can gift your children comfort when they walk in many worlds you should.
— post malone ergo propter malone (@PropterMalone) June 2, 2023
Of course, Bethany is just a bog-standard Professional Conservative, not a testosterone-blessed Paradigm Shifter…
You absolutely will not believe what this man decides the solution to the childcare crisis is. https://t.co/UMedRrNOaN
— Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. (@clapifyoulikeme) June 2, 2023
(If you follow the thread — I wouldn’t recommend it to the easily horrified, or to parents of young children — dude continues to double down on his ‘how hard can it be to watch a 3-year-old nap and cut nuggets?’ theory. And there are multiple dads (no moms, for some reason) adding their own helpful suggestions!)
Alison Rose
The “it’s unnatural to hang out with people your own age” argument is fucking bizarre. But okay, sure, Bethany, lemme hang out with some would-be 5th graders. I’ll pick up a couple college kids on the way so we can have a nicely mixed age group which is very cool and normal.
Also if I’d never gone to school, I never would have experienced the hysterical joy of my teachers assuming my bloodshot eyes were caused only by my allergies and not by the fact that I was baked all day at school in freshman and sophomore years.
brendancalling
The anti-school philosophy has, in fact, infected the field of education. I remember my instructors advising that I let the students decide what they were going to learn. My reaction was a dumbfounded “how ate teenagers—whose brains aren’t fully developed—in any way prepared to decide what they should learn?”
this is a field that notoriously jumps from one shiny object to another. A few years back it was all about “resilience” and “grit.” Now it’s all “trauma-informed.” It’s one buzzword after the other, treating teenagers and young minds as if they were nothing more than variables in some grad student’s experiment. This has not worked out well for anyone, students especially.
brendancalling
@Alison Rose: your teacher knew, they just chose to give you a break. Trust me on this one.
Major Major Major Major
paternalistic chuckle
Man, I just do not miss spending time on twitter at all. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, this is plenty lol.
Back home now… watching Glow… working on writing that game… need to write up some vacation pics…
Kent
Teacher here.
I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that all of this anti-public school hysteria on both the right and left (but mostly the right) is peaking at the very moment in time when the US public school population has reached majority-minority status.
In 2010, white children made up 52% of the public school population. Today a decade later it is about 44%.
It is always about race and it has always been about race.
Alison Rose
@brendancalling: Nah, not at that school. While I was there, the principal was an authoritarian asshole (except when it came to the football team), and a number of my friends did get nabbed and caught hell over it. Plus, I mean, it was literally all day some days, so it was multiple teachers. Maybe I was better at hiding it because I was raised by stoner parents, LOL.
Anne Laurie
BING-BING-BING! You are correct, sir!
But the specific useful idiots discussed here are mostly human axolotls who resent discovering that being classified as ‘gifted’ in second grade (if only because one’s parents know the right bureaucratic pathways) doesn’t automatically mean a tenured position at a major university or a $250k desk job when they age out of the existing (bad! FAILED!) system, IMO.
Hoppie
Back in the eighties we took advantage of the home-schooling Kentucky allowed for the fundies. Our business kept us on the road a lot, and we made sure the kid did all his work. But when he went to high school, the admins wouldn’t give him any credit for days he wasn’t physically present. C’s and D’s.
We were not about to leave a fourteen year old alone home for four or five days at a time; duh, I was that age once. We talked to the Principal, who would not budge. So, home teach it was,
I did math and French. Ms. Hoppie did English. We shared History and Common Sense.
I soon discovered he had a math metathesis: the common thread to his math mistakes was flipping digits. This could be solved.
After two years of home schooling, we sent him to live with his grandmother for his senior high school year, where he tested into advanced placement at the local state university (where she taught History) in physics and calculus.
He now makes big bucks as an IT guy.
This world is a very strange place. I am very grateful randomness worked to our advantage. More flexibility in education is very good, allowing large swathes of the population to raise bigoted ignoramuses is bad. I cannot square the circle.
Major Major Major Major
@Anne Laurie: same. Being amplified/whipped up by the usual suspects. A handful of red/brown genuine bad actors I’m sure.
Kent
@Anne Laurie:
After 15 years of public school teaching in large diverse high schools in both TX and WA I can somewhat generalize categories of students and parents.
Asian parents (at least professional ones) tend to want their children to be more CHALLENGENED. They are the ones who will show up at school board meetings arguing for things like more advanced middle school math pathways and such. I’ve never once had an Asian parent contact me because I’m being too tough on their child. Not once.
White parents all too often seek to have their children coddled and advantaged. And many have learned to manipulate the system to extract various “accommodations” and such. And apply most of their pressure to advantage their children though more generous grading and such. I don’t know how many emails I’ve gotten, always from white parents, requesting this and that special accommodation or treatment so their child can squeak out an A in my class. It can be endless
Of course those are stereotypes but they tend to ring true.
Hoppie
@Hoppie: Adding: he was one of the first hyaline membrane babies to survive (UK med center Lexington). We are very fond of socialist medicine, and the US economy is better off for it. Suck it up, RWNJs.
Gretchen
Shiny, Happy People, the documentary about the 19 and Counting family, just came out on Amazon prime, with interviews with several people who broke free of that cult. They went into detail about « homeschooling » , more like educational neglect and indoctrination. It seems to involve a lot of railing against porn, including descriptions of porn so small children will know what porn is, which explains why they think there’s porn in public schools. Way more disturbing than anything you’d find in a library. It’s worth watching, with all the trigger warnings. And warns of the Christian Nationalism they plan to impose on the rest of it.
Gretchen
@Hoppie: it’s a wonderful thing that they figured out how to treat that.
eclare
@Kent:
Interesting, thanks for the stats.
Chris T.
As a kid, I had a sleep disorder (which I still have) that meant I was quite often up until 2 AM, even if I went to bed at 10 PM and turned out the lights.
I might say it didn’t do me any harm, except that it did me a lot of harm. I still can’t live properly in society…
eclare
@Gretchen:
A lot of home schoolers do it so that they can abuse their kids. Teachers are required to report abuse, as are doctors, so home school the kids and don’t take them to doctors, and you can get away with murder.
Like that couple who drove their six adopted kids off of a cliff in California. Home schooled.
Chris T.
@Gretchen:
In the public schools I went to, the fifth and sixth graders talked crap about sex (getting really basic stuff wrong like thinking girls had testicles for instance) and the seventh through 12th graders brought in porn mags, and/or showed their friends their dad’s collection. (I saw at least one dad’s, no mom’s-collection though.) So yeah, there was porn, but the kids were going to get / see it anyway.
Oh, and, in 5th grade there was this one guy in one of my classes who kept drawing hourglasses and circles. It took me a couple of years to figure that one out. (Why yes, that was the kid who was already growing a beard, how did you guess?)
Ken_L
I was certainly a naturally inquisitive child. Left to my own devices in a library, I would eventually have been able to identify practically every known bird and animal on sight, write a comprehensive summary of Australia’s exploits in two world wars, and recite the batting and bowling statistics of hundreds of test cricketers. And describe the mysteries of sex in meticulous detail.
Not sure this would have set me up for a productive, satisfying life in adulthood.
Mel
@brendancalling: Yes, indeed.
Eolirin
I’m pretty sure most of these arguments on Twitter are total bullshit, but trad schooling really does suck if you’re not in the middle of the bellcurve and can’t afford specialized schools.
Rebel’s Dad
So, 2 points:
Rebel’s Dad
@Ken_L: That depends on if you accept society’s definition of “productive” and “successful”. I don’t.
Rebel’s Dad
@brendancalling: This is one reason I decided to work in higher education and not K-12. It’s not the kids; it’s their parents. I could barely tolerate the incompetent Ph.Ds I worked with at the college; dealing with parents would have made me homicidal.
mrmoshpotato
The stupid,
it burnsit’s stupid!NotMax
Time to again roll out the horror story of an 11th grade American History class (required subject, otherwise ~98% of the kids would not have been there) I taught before saying sayonara to teaching.
Class size of 52. That’s not a typo. 52. Met in a portable classroom, the one furthest from the school building proper. Fun, fun, fun dashing through the snow during Minnesota wintertime.
Wait, it gets better…
Class held during a split period — take attendance, attempt to knock some knowledge into teenage skulls, then when the next bell rang they’d all head off to lunch. And return after that.
Take attendance a second time, rinse, repeat.
NotMax
Aw, fudge. Coding fail. Fix.
Time to again roll out the horror story of an 11th grade American History class (required subject, otherwise ~98% of the kids would not have been there) I taught before saying sayonara to teaching.
Class size of 52. That’s not a typo. 52. Met in a portable classroom, the one furthest from the school building proper. Fun, fun, fun dashing through the snow during Minnesota wintertime.
Wait, it gets better…
Class held during a split period — take attendance, attempt to knock some knowledge into teenage skulls, then when the next bell rang they’d all head off to lunch. And return after that.
Take attendance a second time, rinse, repeat.
Frankensteinbeck
@eclare:
EeeeeeYUP. The evangelicals launched and completely won a culture war in the 80s to convince mainstream America that good parenting involved near-total oversight of their children, so they could get away with physical and emotional abuse, and another to convince America that kids were surrounded by outside predators so they could get away with sexual abuse. Sorry, but statistics say the call is coming from inside the house. While racism is hugely involved, and so is indoctrination, evangelical homeschooling drive involves a big chunk of wanting to be able to do whatever horrible shit they feel like to their kids without the Feds finding out.
@Rebel’s Dad:
Anarchists. I’ve interacted with enough of them. Anarchists who believe corporations = government. It is a very, very simplistic view of the world.
Rusty
I was a public high school science teacher for three years right out of college. Teacher, student and subject are the fundamental mix of education. The “let the kids decide ” are trying to eliminate subjects (I’m in New Hampshire where we are in a huge battle over what constitutes a basic education, a comprehensive curriculum, because that goes to what it costs) and effectively eliminating teachers because if you eliminate a subject you eliminate the teacher. There is also the practical matter that even if you don’t eliminate the teacher, you need structure to get a qualified teacher of the subject in front of the student at the right moment and no one can afford to do that one on one so you need schools to provide it at one place and at a time. Follow any of these rabbit holes and you end up recreating schools.
The right is attacking schools because they want to unilaterally control curriculum, not pay for it (especially for the poor and non-white) and hate unions.
One thing out of the pandemic was that it put a stake through the heart of the tech bro fantasy of eliminating teachers with computers, remote learning was a disaster at the K-12 level. Even when it works with students at the high school or college level, you still need a teacher.
The Dark Avenger
If not for the bullies in school, how will our children ever become socialized?
raven
@Rusty: I spent 15 years building online course for an undergrad core curriculum. We had four or five content experts, a techie and myself. We had a year to create the course and they were then taught by a full faculty member who was required to go through extensive training on how to teach online. I worked from home and, when I retired, everyone went to working from home and online courses! I knew there was no way for k-12 to just switch to online at the drop of a hat but they really didn’t have a choice.
NotMax
@Rusty
More or less been there, done that. Remember language labs from the 50s and on into the 60s? #1 – #2
Baud
No one has quoted Pink Floyd?
Roger Waters really has shit the bed.
raven
@Baud: I haven’t talked to my brother since this hit. He manages a Floyd cover band in LA and I wonder if this impact attendance at their shows.
NotMax
@Baud
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paperboy brings more
.
raven
@NotMax: I’m not Floyd head but hasn’t he been doing this for 40 years?
eclare
@NotMax:
We don’t need no…education.
rivers
As a former teacher (and a former child), I’d like to point out that home is often a not so great place. A parent doesn’t have to be an alcoholic or mentally ill to create an atmosphere of constant drama, chaos and unpredictability (although it helps). For quite a few children school is a haven, a place where things happen at specified times of the day, where expectations are usually made clear as are the consequences for meeting or not meeting them. It is also a place where a child is treated as a child not as a backup grownup to take charge when things fall apart. Obviously, schools are flawed, and you can have the bad luck to run into a nasty teacher or a bully in the playground. But you can also have the good luck to run into an adult who is sane and sympathetic and has the power to help you. (Of course, the fact that schools are refuges for some children makes school shootings – and the active shooter drills they spawn – all the more appalling.)
NotMax
eclare
A case of yours truly not harvesting the low hanging fruit.
;)
lowtechcyclist
@Rusty:
The pandemic was a disaster at the K-12 level, just like it was everywhere else. But AIUI, there wasn’t a significant difference in how kids did in the 2020-2021 school year between those who were in classes all year and those who did remote learning. A big problem that nobody really tried to address AFAICT was that the spring 2020 quarter had been a shitshow, and whatever the kids had been expected to learn then, that mostly hadn’t happened.
It’s ridiculous to draw any conclusions about the potential efficacy of remote learning from the experiences of the 2020-2021 school year for a number of reasons. Besides the crater where the spring 2020 quarter should have been, we’re talking about a remote learning program that the school systems had three or four months to throw together before the fall 2020 quarter began. Not exactly a fair test of the concept!
Your underlying point is valid, though: the kids still need a teacher, even with remote learning. Somebody still has to present the material and answer individual questions. And parents are still going to want teachers who have an idea of how their kids are doing in class, with more nuance and specifics than ‘well’ or ‘badly.’
The Thin Black Duke
@The Dark Avenger: As someone who was targeted by assholes, what I learned to my horror was that the assholes who bullied me in school were the assholes who were going to bully me in the outside world because these assholes look out for each other. I was lousy at algebra, but I certainly learned coping strategies.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke:
That could be the Republican motto.
lowtechcyclist
@rivers:
Agreed. As bad as things were for me at school for most of my elementary and secondary school years, I can’t imagine how horrible those years would have been if my stay-at-home mom (as was much more the norm back in the 1960s) had home schooled me. She made my life enough of a hell as it was during those years. (She died last fall, after a long spell of dementia. I’ve long since forgiven her, but I still don’t miss her.)
But even aside from those kinds of issues, these days both parents in a two-parent household are likely to be working, and there are a lot of kids being raised by one parent. Realistically the work of teaching kids the things they need to know to eventually become functioning adults needs to be handed off to some other entity. So there’s just no way to get around having a public school system that takes care of K-12 education for the vast majority of kids.
lowtechcyclist
@Frankensteinbeck:
Also, there’s a big overlap between the indoctrination and the abuse. There’s a whole school of evangelical child-rearing thought that is not the least bit metaphorical about “spare the rod and spoil the child.” They teach new parents that they’re going to have to beat their children to break their spirit and instill obedience.
Absolutely horrible shit, and there needs to be real oversight of home schooling to make sure it’s not a cover for abuse, as well as making sure the kids are actually getting taught.
Ken
@lowtechcyclist: Schools in my area (and for all I know, all of Illinois) no longer close for snow. Instead they switch to remote learning. This makes me think that they got remote learning working, if only for those short periods.
One side advantage is they no longer have to build in extra days to allow for anticipated snow, or extend the school year when they go over that guess.
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
I think there’s a huge difference between remote learning as a stopgap during snow days, and as a year-round thing. A lot of things will work passably for a short time as long as their deficiencies can be covered for later.
Princess
@lowtechcyclist: Meh. It’s obvious to anyone teaching at the college level, where the pandemic-schooled kids are starting to turn up, that remote schooling was a disaster for high school students. If they were okay academically, they’re still messed up socially. And most of them are messed up academically.
it’s possible to agree we needed remote schooling and still think it sucked and was bad for kids. There’s going to be a whole generation that’s going to need to catch up and pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t give us the resources to fix it.
Bugboy
I had a boss whose family did this. They had like 8 kids (with 2 of them pre-school aged), but when he asked me to provide them a presentation on mosquitoes, nearly 20 showed up.
ETA: While they were reasonably well behaved, it was jarring seeing kindergarten to high school aged kids in the same “class”. I can’t imagine how they can group teach that kind of age range. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve taught kids about bugs my entire professional career, and I have to tell you the most fabulous group of kids to teach was a special needs class.
RevRick
Attacks on public education have been going on since the Catholic convert, Orestes Brownson, criticized Horace Mann’s efforts in the 1840s to establish free, public schools in Massachusetts, on the grounds that public schools would peddle Protestant orthodoxy.
IOW, as soon as there was public education became a reality, critics we’re trying to tear it down, for one reason or another.
BTW, Brownson, a labor advocate, was also notorious for claiming that the free labor workers in Northern mills were more oppressed than Southern slaves, an argument readily seized upon by Southern slave holders.
RevRick
@brendancalling: When hasn’t anti-schooling, in one form or another, infected educational philosophy?
Ancient Greece?
The Dark Avenger
@The Thin Black Duke: My coping strategy was to kick them in the balls if attacked. I am glad to live long enough to see one of them fall into alcoholism and despair, after their twin brother died.
BellyCat
A problem yet to be solved in schools is the emphasis on extrinsic motivations (A’s) for learning in group environments of widely differing ability. The pace of content matching the middle of the bell curve fosters compliant behaviors, whereas bright, intrinsically motivated individuals often suffer severe boredom and (may eventually) reject the whole magilla in favor of hormonal urges, angst, “rock and roll”, booze, drugs, and other “self-paced educational discoveries” outside classroom confines to the detriment of skills and habits which pay better dividends in (usually) less rigid higher education environments. (Raises hand.)
My son (going into 2nd grade, public school) was surprised by my recent comment on how much he was learning when we were playing Minecraft together. He said he *wasn’t learning* because he was having fun and learning wasn’t fun. What?!?!
He REFUSES to discuss anything he’s learning in school. Ever. I suddenly grokked his daily challenges at school — he’s bored out of his mind already! Gonna be a handful when the teen years hit since the apple appears to have not fallen far from the tree. 😂
Rusty
@lowtechcyclist: your points are well taken. I think age makes a big difference. Our very focused high schooler basically made remote work, still made 5’s on her APs. The middle schooler, did OK for a little while and then it went down hill. The other factor to consider for younger children is the amount of parental involvement. We have friends that were elementary teachers, there were kids in their school system (all grades) that completely disappeared when they went remote. Never logged in even once. I’m very skeptical of stats that compare remote and in classroom learning and don’t account for factors like these.
Kay
@BellyCat:
Public schools are for the big middle though and schools aren’t the only places where children learn. If you have a child who is bored in school you can fairly easily supplement school, like you’re doing with Minecraft. Public schools were intended to provide a baseline education- no one should expect them to serve every need or want of every child – it’s too big an ask and parents are better suited to provide “extras” anyway – Minecraft, gardening, different reading, taking them places.
Ohio Mom
@Bugboy: The special ed classes you taught had lots of adults supporting the students, very small class sizes, and a big emphasis on social-emotional learning. The world would be a better place if all students had the same advantages.
@Kay: The premise upon which special ed law is based is that if children are required by law to attend school, then all children must be served, including ones with disabilities. It is the disabled child’s civil right to attend public school.
Moreover, supports must be provided so that disabled children can access the curriculum — supports including everything from architectural accommodations such as wheelchair accessibility, to interventions such as speech-language therapy, OT, PT, and so forth.
So while it’s true that schools were designed for the middle of the bell curve, and that many of them still function that way, by law, that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be anymore.
I agree that gifted children usually get the shortest end of the stick, particularly in the elementary school years. Our elementary school had a gifted program but I have no idea if it matched the special needs services in effectivenes.
I think the gifted kids’ needs were well-served in the high school but then again, ours is a well-funded suburban district that can afford all kinds of bells and whistles.
frosty
@Ohio Mom: My oldest is dyslexic so he was on the other side of the bell curve. Sure, schools are required to teach disabled kids but our experience was no, they didn’t. We had him tutored once his kindergarten teacher told us he wasn’t learning his letters.
The school’s response when we asked for help? “He’s at grade level.” Our answer? “Fine, we’ll take him out of tutoring for two years and when he’s two years behind grade level, THEN will you do something?”
We found a private school that specialized in dyslexics and spent his college savings teaching him to read. He graduated high school then got a BA in Criminal Justice. Money well spent.
Citizen Alan
@brendancalling: My cynical view is that there is a fundamental design flaw in the american teaching profession. All of the opinion movers within the profession are basically ex-teachers who hated teaching in the classroom. Overwhelmingly, in my experience, school administrators and college level education professors were people who got into high school education and found they hated having to teach high school students. But they had too many years in the system to simply change careers, so they either went back to get admin degrees and become high school principals or vice principals, or else they got a doctorate in education so they could teach at the college level, both of which pay much better than public school teaching and also do not require them to deal with students outside of either discipline or college level classes.
BellyCat
With public schooling aimed primarily to the middle, for those on either side of the curve it can feel like a type of “educational prison”, deleteriously affecting self-worth.
My son — incredibly bright, a phenomenal “self-learner”, and likely “gifted” — knows that he’s different. However, his explanation is “I’m an idiot.” Breaks my heart.
I have taught in higher ed for thirty years, from adjunct to full-time, including some “fancy” universities. My son’s school system wanted to hire me (well before he was conceived) but told me that I would have to get a teaching certificate at my expense (about $25k and at least two years). I asked if I did so and then pursued a Masters in Education who would pay for it. They said *they* would. Given this, I then asked if they would reimburse me for the Masters degree I already had (from a very fancy school) in the specific field they wanted me to teach (digital design and fabrication topics). And I would happily pay for the teaching certificate; thus reversing the order of degree acquisition.
You can guess their position about this seemingly logical proposition as their offer was retracted. 😂
Chris T.
@BellyCat:
HR people are famous for their flexibility and logical reasoning. (Not!)
(I’ve learned to work around / past HR when possible.)
BellyCat
@Chris T.: Indeed. Little known fact: HR is the first knot in the employment noose.
Paul in KY
@Rebel’s Dad: Obtaining money for your career.
Paul in KY
@The Dark Avenger: One POS who gave me trouble I found out recently had died a dope fiend. I was so happy!
Paul in KY
@Kay: Agreed, Kay!