Bad teachers

[vsp]

In the West Chester public school system, I don't recall many teachers that were actively bad or abusive. Plenty of mediocrity, of course, with a few side helpings of apathy, but not many stood out as actual impediments.

I did have at least one teacher that was effectively _too good_ for his role. When I was in the gifted program in my middle-school years, I worked with a math & science teacher named Pete Lee who was fantastic. A few years later, he was transferred to a "regular" middle-school class, and my sister had him for 7th- or 8th-grade math.

I was more than mildly surprised when there was a revolt of sorts against his methods. My sister bitched regularly about the homework assignments, and I recognized some of them when I looked at them; many revolved around word problems that not only made you apply the mathematical rules and equations being studied, but also made you think about their applications in everyday life. You might have to actually READ the problems to deduce the actual equations to be solved, instead of being simply presented with blanks to fill in, but the principles were sound.

Instead, the kids looked at the problems and said "What the hell are these?" They took them home to their parents, who were also expecting simple fill-in-the-blank homework, and they said "What the hell are these?" The parents raised complaints, and I shook my head ruefully from a distance. Making kids think? Unthinkable!