I am not a politician. I am not a political writer. But I have opinions about the policies that affect my life and livelihood. And my opinions, though often expressed poetically, or even humorously, are based on real troubles never-the-less.
I am disturbed by the problems I see in education. Teachers are not paid what they are worth. Anyone with half a brain can see that, for the level of education required of them, the professionalism expected of them, and the ever-increasing responsibilities foisted upon them, they are not compensated for their work in a manner comparable to people who do the same work in the corporate world. And those comparable workers never have to endure the conditions of a teacher’s job, overloaded with students, forced to stand and deliver to a hostile audience whose behavior you are responsible for controlling six or seven times a day, and then being evaluated by how that audience does on tests that often measure the wrong thing with financial punishments waiting for failure and rarely any rewards waiting for success.
I started teaching in 1981 in South Texas for a salary of $11,000 dollars a year. That was below the poverty line in 1981. If I had a family at that time, we would’ve been eligible for food stamps. The highest I ever earned was $55,000 with a master’s degree, 28 years of experience, and a summer of teaching summer school. Some one who delivers similar forms of information to a receptive audience in a boardroom, only has to deliver maybe once per day, and is paid upwards of twice that highest amount is treated far better.
And when teachers strike in West Virginia for being the lowest paid in the country, or a teacher complains on social media by revealing their actual yearly salary from Arizona, or a teacher is forced to move from Oklahoma to Texas for higher pay even though they were the teacher of the year in the State the year before, there is blow-back. There are stupid people out there that think teachers are overpaid. They think all teachers have to do is talk to kids every day, and they have only 185 work days a year, they have the summer off, and their job is one anyone can do. These stupid people have less than half a brain. What makes a guy who sits in an office all day with his feet up making decisions about stocks and bonds and business deals worth thousands of dollars a minute? Teachers, in my amateur political opinionater’s opinion, are underpaid.
To quote the Beatles’ 1969 animated movie, the Yellow Submarine, “It’s a blue world, Max.” Unfortunately, in the world of education, the Blue Meanies are now in charge.
Catch a Falling Star 
What to Write About Today…
I have to admit it. I am pretty goofy.
Probably not Harpo Marx levels of goofy.
But close.
So, I have gone back and looked at what I have been writing about during the course of my relentless three-year write-a-thon. I am artist enough to recognize patterns. At least, I can recognize the big and obvious ones. Okay, I admit it, sometimes, while thinking, I am really only pretending to think. That makes me kinda like Harpo, doesn’t it?
I reread one of what I think are my best works just now because somebody viewed it online for some reason I will never know. The essay is Toccata and Fugue in D Minor written on March 23rd of 2017. In that essay, I compare a super-condensed version of my life story to Johan Sebastian Bach’s masterwork, one that is represented in Disney’s masterwork Fantasia. My thesis was basically, “Living life is like a piece of classical music.” Yep, total nonsense.
But that is not nearly as nonsensical as the nonsense I wrote in The Dancing Poultry Conspiracy Theory. That one should make me ashamed of myself. Not to mention the danger inherent in revealing a thing that governments of the world have worked so hard to suppress the knowledge of. There is something seriously wrong with any government who would let wackos use the mysterious martial art of Ententanz Fu on anybody.
I also fairly recently wrote a poem about writing poetry. It was called The Secret Behind Poetry and in the course of the poem I carefully reason out that I have no idea at all what the secret behind poetry is.
I am epically good at writing bad poetry. That is why I was chosen to host the Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge which I did badly, getting no entries at all from Planet Earth, and being forced to settle on the submissions I posted in The Ixcanixian Bad Poetry Challenge
As I have not yet been vaporized by Ixcanixian skortch rays, then I guess I did the challenge badly enough to satisfy the intergalactic poetry lords of Ixcanix. I offer that here as proof that I am really pretty bad at writing poetry.
I am also pretty good at taking an idea and turning it upside down to get a good look at its bottom and to flatten its top a bit. I did that in an essay called Pessimism as a Super Power.
I suppose it is really about losing a writing contest, but the thesis is valid. One can save themselves a lot of grief by always expecting the worst outcome to happen. You are never disappointed according to what you expected unless it is turned into a pleasant surprise. I also admit that is really a Benjamin Franklin idea, but if you turn Ben upside down, he’s already a bit flat on the top of his bald head and he has an interesting pantalooned bottom. (That is supposed to be a joke, so try not to be too disgusted with me.)
So, what will I actually write about today? What is the pattern I am supposed to follow? Well, it seems pretty obvious, I am basically unpredictable. So maybe today I will just recycle some old posts and pretend I have been thinking.
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Filed under commentary, conspiracy theory, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, poetry
Tagged as Metacognition