SUBJECT: Letter of Resignation - I Quit!
Dear sir:
At the end of this school year, I will no longer be a teacher at [Volkschulen] High School nor be employed by Harnett County Schools. I'm giving up my career as a public school teacher, something I should have done two years ago when stress from teaching caused me to have a stroke. Problems with my medications and ever-increasing stress in the classroom brought me to this decision.
Classroom stress comes in the form of students who don't want to learn - just play, parents who don't care if their kids learn so long as they get a passing grade, and school officials who won't let me teach the basic skills and knowledge kids really need - the way it was successfully taught until 50 years ago when public schools began experimenting with every new learning theory that came along.
Five out of the six observations I've had this year admonished me for my refusal to address the needs of so-called "diverse" learners, from the learning styles theory - one of your newest experimental teaching strategies. Now let me now explain why I'm so "rigid."
I think it's academically wrong to assume you can improve the verbal skills of high school students by reading to/for them or improve their writing skills through some group effort. The NC Writing Assessment measures the writing skill of the individual student; so far, we don't have any standardized group testing.
It's also foolish to suppose you can improve reading comprehension by allowing students to play games in class or by drawing pictures and cutting out paper dolls as a means of expressing how they feel about a particular piece of literature. This thematic visualization strategy will not teach them how to analyze literature. And literary analysis is something many VHS students have little clue about because they've been read to or allowed to play, rather than learn.
I also think it's ethically wrong to force me to adhere to education philosophies and teaching strategies diametrically opposed to my own. I'm obviously not a pragmatist or progressive [constructivist]. If my essentialist philosophy and teaching strategies are so bad, why did they work so successfully for hundreds of years in this country, and why are they still being used successfully by home schooling parents and in thousands of traditional Christian schools?
About 40 percent of
Most importantly, I think it's morally wrong to experiment with the minds of children! A mind really is a terrible thing to waste, and public schools are wasting the minds and lives of yet another generation. Forcing teachers to accommodate so-called learning disability labels is mildly insane.
Why don't we just follow that country comedian's suggestion about signs? Each student can wear his or her personal sign, explaining his or her particular learning preference and label. Then the whole world will understand that Johnny can't read because Johnny doesn't have to: Johnny's a diverse learner.
RC Murray
This letter was submitted by RC Murray to his former principal then the Harnett County superintendent in May 2005. Despite a 28.5 percent teacher turnover that year and even though his high school failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress since opening its doors in 2004 and has been placed under probation by the NC State Board of Education, the Harnett County School Board selected his former principal as Principal of the Year in 2006 then promoted him to assistant superintendant in 2007. The former assistant principal who hounded Murray for his refusal to pass "diverse" learners that failed to learn anything was rewarded with a principal's job in another Harnett County school. What a standard!!!