Short One Today...

Again, I am thoroughly disgusted with the state of our country. With only five days of summer school left (praise the Lord) I am just now able to get to what will actually be on the national exam they will have to take. What have I been doing these past twenty days? Teaching fifteen year-olds what nouns and verbs are. I'm sorry, but you cannot teach semicolons and tense when they can't even tell you what the damn subject is. So I spend twenty days going over parts of speech that they didn't learn in middle school because that is not covered on their middle school state tests, so why teach it? I literally had a student ask me what a fragment was. Now that I have taught this, I have five days to teach them parallel structure and correct semicolon use.

Don't even get me started on the fact that only five of the fifteen I am teaching can read cursive handwriting. At the start of summer school I had a student who needed help signing for her child support check for her two kids. Oh, did I mention I teach freshman in high school?
There's that old saying that you can judge the state of a nation by how it treats its poorest citizens. Well, I work with our poorest citizens and I can tell you that America is in sorry shape.