Justin, God save you if the day ever comes that the talk radio posse turns on carpenters.
'Nuff said.

Justin,

Educators are not babysitters, breakfast and lunch providers, are not responsible for education and learning when the child is out or off school property (baring some extra curricula voluntary teacher school programs) under the parent’s control and guidance.

It’s about time parent’s stand up and take responsibility for their children and stop passing responsibility onto teachers so they can actually do their jobs and educate besides the 100 pounds of extra paperwork they must now complete for state and government programs!

You complain about the high salaries and indicated before you and you wife are trying to become regular teachers so then you must understand how much extra crap has been dumped on educators besides the constant beat of the drum how they don’t know what they are doing and how bad they are.

Justin, if you and your wife have gone through all the steps to become educators, you taught part time, why are you not contributing to education and making a difference instead of complaining all the time (like the Governor who ended up teaching in private Catholic school which the educator standards are very different than public school?

Do I detect can't make it as an educator in public school system!

Ken,

I can't speak to what you think you're detecting, but you are incorrect. I've no intention of becoming a teacher. Once, I would have liked to be a college professor, and for a few months I taught seventh grade as a long-term substitute.

In your recitation of a stock perspective, you skip entirely the point that I was actually making. For the record:

• I agree that parents are too uninvolved.
• I agree that schools should not be breakfast and lunch providers or babysitters.
• I don't believe I've ever said that teachers "don't know what they're doing."

My point is simply this: the work experience of most adults entails getting the job done and advancing based on our success and the success of the organizations for which we work. Sometimes that involves thought or even research after hours. Sometimes it involves discussion with clients. If we don't know how to do something, most of us consider it to be our responsibility to find it out. (Employer-paid education is often on the table for wholly new or very substantial bodies of knowledge.)

The idea that most professionals would behave as work-to-ruling teachers do under court order ignores the reality that most professionals would never find themselves in those circumstances in the first place.

"The idea of banding with coworkers for a work stoppage with the intention of procuring even larger raises despite the employer's well-known financial hardships and a lack of notable improvement (to say the least) probably strikes the majority of us as a species of lunacy."

I'm sure you would think it was lunacy to leave the big house for work with others in the fields. It's one of many differences that you have with the people who band together to help improve each others lives.

"Most of us, I venture to suggest, cannot envision circumstances in which a court would have to order us back to work."

The fact that they are ordered back to work as a group is another reason why these workers must band together.

I don't know what you do for a living, Phil, but I'm "out in the fields" at least six days a week — out there with people who would rather work than parade around the city demanding the respect of a public whose political processes are manipulated for their advantage.

Your circular reasoning with respect to being ordered to work as a group and banding as a group does not disguise the fundamentally exclusive and self-interested nature of public sector unions. At whose expense are they "improving each others lives"?

Justin said: ‘We take jobs understanding the general structure of the career ladder and expecting that raises will be related to: 1) our performance, and 2) our employers' fortunes.’ Boy oh boy! Are you a wimp or what! You are probably down with serfdom too! So you work a job for 20 years and your employer keeps on telling you your performance sucks ( this is what public sector workers are quite acquainted with) and, that while the employer continues to receive gain from your labor, continues to undervalue it--- and tell you that through their incompetence- not yours- they can’t pay you……… and you buy that? Wow. You want to buy a bridge? I know what you will say. The worker can take his or her labor elsewhere. Really. Let the cold wind of reality blow over that notion. You let employers set the rate and what do you think you –the worker- is going to get. Lets hear it from all those happy private sector workers.

I don't know about serfdom, David, but you're the one with the manifestly low opinion of human capability and individualism. Where would we be without our gangs? Where would we be without thug-like bureaucrats greasing politicians and organizing vote drives?

Now reread what I've written with your best attempt at imagining a species of hominids that's capable of thinking and planning ahead, and endowed by their Creator with rights, drive, and a capacity for imagination. In other words pretend that the following statement addresses sentient beings who don't need to be guided through their lives by well-meaning, parasitic organizers:

We take jobs understanding the general structure of the career ladder and expecting that raises will be related to: 1) our performance, and 2) our employers' fortunes.

In other words, we know what our careers entail, we know that our performance and the success of our employers affect our chances for advances, and we work within that structure. If our employers are in the rocks, we make due, look elsewhere, or (gasp!) do what we can to turn things around. We don't abuse children whom it is our vocation to educate by holding their academic careers hostage and despoiling their experiences thereof for our own gain, especially when it is clear that we fare better than the majority of our neighbors.

As for "their incompetence- not yours": that's perhaps the biggest bit of BS that I've heard in quite a while. The government of Rhode Island — in all its calamitous glory — has been facilitated by public sector unions' thinking they could squeeze the system year after year with no adverse consequences (at least for them).

Justin Your response to David includes a reference to "their Creator". With your bitterness towards teachers so apparent I'm glad that it seems you may be clinging to your god rather than your gun.
What I do for a living is my business. But rest assured it is not polishing the silver up at the big house.