I don't care that you're talking negatively or positively about teachers and at what ratio. That's not the point. Your point concerns whether the teacher's union should be abolished or not, and you're using your experiences with teacher's to describe the whole of the teaching profession. It's an invalid argument.
Whoa. What? My point is not about abolishing the teacher's union. I would not be in favor of abolishing the teacher's union. But I do not think it should be nearly impossible / supremely expensive to fire a bad teacher.
That is my point. A bad teacher should be fireable in some reasonable way. This is the point I'm making when I say that tenure, in its current form, should be abolished. If I expressed it in some way that made it possible to interpret my words as saying that the teacher's union should be abolished, let me correct that right now: I never said that.
"Frankly, teachers are grossly overpaid for what most of them contribute." You make this overreaching argument about "teachers." You make such an authoritative statement based on nothing, which essentially experiencing less than .00...01 percent of the teachers out there is. It'd be the same invalid argument if someone came in saying "Teachers are grossly underpaid for what most of them contribute," and offering only his/her experience with teachers as the basis for the argument.
My statement was not meant to be authoritative, it is my opinion. That, too, I think was made entirely clear by another portion of my post that you chose not to quote. Are you one of these fellows who needs "in my opinion" to be put in front of every statement a person makes? It was also an exaggeration to make a point. I thought it would be clear from the context that when, in one paragraph I said teachers are overpaid for what most of them do, and in another paragraph I said that some of them ought to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, my point was not that ALL teachers are overpaid -- my point went to the hypothetical notion that there ought to be a way to pay a teacher based on their contributions. There is currently no such method. I know there is no such method. You know there is no such method. Hence the exaggeration. I do not propose that this is realistic. It's kind of like wishing for peace on earth. You know it's not going to happen, but it doesn't make you a chucklehead to say you think there should be peace on earth.
Furthermore, my statement was not based on nothing. It is based on my experiences as a public school student, and my observations as a person belonging to this American society, who talks to other people, reads the news, and forms ideas about things.
That's all it is.
And at the risk of further exasperating everybody, I'll repeat my points in a way that hopefully won't be misconstrued: I don't have a high opinion of teachers as a collective. I don't think that being a teacher merits special recognition by society inherently. I do think that there are great teachers out there. I do think there are some teachers who, due to their individual merits, deserve special recognition. I do think there are some teachers who deserve far more pay and respect than they receive.
