Kind of rude to shit.
Exactly this. And at all levels.
At the public school level, teachers are lazy and stupid.
At the college level, professors are indoctrinators of liberal ideology and socialism.
All scientists are just self-serving grant-seekers, especially climate scientists, who are alarmists that are just in it for the money.
On the plus side, the great thing about modern America is all the guns.
The Martin_Hyde credo, in a nutshell. His rants in support of guns and against teachers are so delusional that they defy parody.
Accurate.
Education with Republican characteristics.
Saying such an arrogant and stupid fucking thing is a pretty good basis. I wouldn’t say you were drunk though, just an asshole.
Serving on a school board is not a matter of “caring about the kids.” The public schools are primarily funded by property taxes as an investment in the community and its future. The school board’s obligation is to the community at large, not to the teacher’s unions. The children are a part of that, and obviously they and their families are the most direct stakeholders. But a good school board member is someone who understands the role of oversight and understands that the teachers unions and many teachers largely exist to secure a sinecure and to limit oversight from “non-educators.” It is a very common refrain among teachers to complain about how elected non-educators have oversight over them, but this ignores the basic reality that teachers work in a system directly funded by and for the community.
The policies and rhetoric promoted by teachers and their unions are frequently anti-student and anti-public policy, it may violate liberal sacred cows to say that, but that doesn’t make it not true.
JFC, you’re stupid.
I’m curious what ended your tenure on the school board.
Doesn’t make it true, either.
I typically see such reactions in parents who have a student that is failing, and rather than blame their kid or themselves, they only have the teachers left to blame.
Their kid got an F in a subject, and that parent wants that teacher fired, and is pissed that the teacher’s union prevents them from getting them fired the same way they got the cashier at the local Wendy’s fired when they misunderstood their order.
I think it’s reasonable to assume he approached his role on the school board the way he approaches his participation on this messageboard: with an unwarranted sense of superiority and a tendency to automatically assume any criticism of him is due to his delivery of hard truths rather than because he’s a disingenuous asshole.
Although I’m sure teachers, who actually work extremely difficult and complex jobs for little reward, are always thrilled to have yet another smug Dunning-Krugerite tell them that he knows how to do their jobs better than they do.
Also typical Republican view that the only thing that matters is money. The purpose of public schools is to raise property values, education of children is an entirely tangential side effect. Teachers, like electricity, are an unfortunate fungable expense whose cost should be minimized as much as possible.
Yes, exactly. The school board is mostly about budgeting and stuff. It’s only peripherally about the kids. And that’s why your claim that you understand teachers because you were on a school committee is, at best, bizarre.
And everyone likes more pay and less work, so I’m sure many teachers do, too. But teachers are one of the few groups of people who mostly could have gotten more pay for less work, and chose not to. I’ve worked with several ex teachers, who liked the more predictable hours and better pay of being an actuary. And were damn good actuaries. And had some regrets about not doing as much good for the world as they had as teachers.
My most vivid memories of school board members are from the time I spent covering them as a reporter:
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the board member who declared that his top priority for the high school was to ensure that it had winning sports teams
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the white board majority who ignored the hired outside consultant’s expert downsizing recommendations, and voted to close two majority black inner city high schools, with predictable uproar
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the board candidate who fulminated at a community forum about a lack of student discipline, answering an audience question about whether he’d favor bringing back corporal punishment by saying “whatever it takes”, then lied and denied he’d said it.
As a group, teachers get my respect (a few from my student days I remember warmly). My memories of school board members are of egotistical hacks and dingbats.
“Yes they deserve to get whacked in the butt! And I hope it burns like helllll!”
— Samuel L. Jackson, coming to a local school board near you
Ah, yes, the predictable anti-union rhetoric of the right-wing nutbars.
Ditto.
I bet you were out firing off all your guns in celebration when Wisconsin’s certifiable lunatic governor essentially gutted teachers’ unions.
The reality is that teachers’ unions have long been fighting for better funding for education, smaller classes, and more attention given to disadvantaged students.
Ignorant far-right anti-intellectual troglodytes like you are one of the main reasons that America has one of the worst public school systems in the developed world, whereas Canada – with strong teachers’ unions and a strong sense of equality and commitment to the public school system – has one of the best.
It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that you’re just an uninformed, anti-education asshole.
Exactly–and this is exactly why the anti-public-schools conservatives hate educator unions.
Here in NC, we’re fighting like hell to get the Leandro Decision enforced. Our conservative legislature has almost exactly said, “The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it.” They don’t want to fund schools in the way that they’re constitutionally obliged to do, because that would require additional taxes, and it would interfere with their agenda of privatizing and resegregating our school system. Public education is a great equalizer in our society, and that’s not remotely what mainstream conservatives want.
Martin was almost certainly a dumpster fire of a school board member. Hopefully he was run out of town on a rail, but sadly, conservatives are really well-organized and good at taking over school systems in order to gut them.
This chest-beating comes to you courtesy of Canadian Pride™. 
I freely admit to sometimes being annoying that way, but while I dearly love many aspects of the nation to our south, there are also many aspects that legitimately and objectively piss off most enlightened Americans every bit as much as they engender sorrow in international observers all over the developed world.
One of those things is that the US has the resources to have the best public education system on the planet, available to all. Instead it’s been chronically underfunded, economically segregated, politicized, and then maligned for its failures. The conservative message has always been that if you want your kids to have a quality education, that’s what private schools are for. And if you can’t afford it, well, it sucks to be you. The squandered opportunity here is a national tragedy, and troglodytes like Martine_Hyde and their idiotic prejudices are emblematic of the problem.
The other two things I can be annoyingly smug about have the same root causes in the American cadre of right-wing morons. One is the rejection of the incredible efficiencies and the basic humanity of universal health care that’s been adopted by the entirety of the civilized world, and opting instead for an unworkable “free market” approach to what is a fundamental human right. And the other is the reckless proliferation of guns in America, again a catastrophic problem that is unique in the civilized world, and again a position strongly advocated by the subject of this thread and his fellow gun nuts.
So forgive me if I sometimes come across as smug, but most Europeans, Australians, and New Zealanders all see the same problems in America in the same objective terms and arising from the same moronically misguided and self-serving ideologies.
Given this is the pit and there’s 0% chance you’re interested in my answer, I shouldn’t bother, but:
I retired from the Army; I had always wanted to be more involved in local politics. I had been active in the Republican party unit committees for my home area, but there were limits to how involved I could be due to regulations about active-duty service members and partisan politics (also just the fact I would sometimes be moved away for years at a time presented logistical barriers to greater involvement); school board was a way to get involved and intersected with some of my interests. I was elected two times and then retired because about halfway through my second term I had entered into a business partnership which I still manage, and that significantly reduced my free time for political activity and being involved in an elected board + running the business were just more time than I wanted to invest away from leisure activities.
Note that school board was technically non-partisan in Virginia until 2019 when they revised it, but it would be known at the unit committee Mass Meetings (caucuses) if local school board candidates were affiliated with one party or another. In small school districts like the one where I was elected and things were usually not hotly contested, being known at the Mass Meeting could be decisive. Things are a lot different if you’re talking a school board associated with a big district in a higher population county/city.