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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023Liked by Martin Hackworth

Nice, although disconcerting column Martin. My background was similar to yours. Today, it is imperative for parents to engage and support teachers in the education of children. Far too many take the approach that it is "us vs. them" when dealing with issues related to the education of their children. Parents want "control" (whatever that is) as if they have a completed curriculum at home and are carefully guiding their child's educational flight plan (home school is perhaps the exception here).

Paradoxically, many parents see the educational environment as a political battlefield to voice a political stance rather than an opportunity to demand excellence and encourage rigor. It took a third grade teacher of mine to walk me home and have a discussion with my parents as to why I was lazy and so far behind in schoolwork. From that moment on, I developed a 'system' of accountability and engagement that is with me to this day. My parents were so appreciative of that teacher and, as such, took it upon themselves to make the necessary 'adjustments' in my attitude that made the process work. I doubt this sort of relationship happens very often today.

My kids here in Pocatello were also sent to a parochial school and endured the same sort of action/response curve that shaped my educational journey. Today, I am proud to say that my oldest works a rewarding job as a lead marketer for the University of Pittsburgh Women's Medical Center (she has a gift at communicating), my middle son is entering his residency as a Pediatric Physician in the Air Force and my youngest, after achieving a BS in wildlife biology, has contemplated a life of service through the priesthood. All three are incredibly well adjusted and focused, not because of my bumbling approach to parenting, but because my wife's insistence they have an early education system that was supportive yet rigorous, humbling, and compassionate. Yeah, I am an advocate for parental choice for school because it IS the most important decision a parent can do for their kids. I wish you the best at achieving the optimal environment for getting your children educated despite the short-comings of today's system.

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Apr 27, 2023Liked by Martin Hackworth

Martin I have seen how some department chairs when faced with student complaints about a particular “hard” instructor and professor would do the right thing and instruct the complaining student to go first to the instructor to discuss whatever shortcoming they believed the instructor had. That was the appropriate and professional approach in which the chair had the backs of their colleagues. However some chairs also have encouraged disgruntled students to HO over their instructor’s head directly to his or her office to make their complaint. Apart from being an unprofessional and uncollegial action that chair was imparting an attitude and behavior that would later in life destroy that former student’s credibility and likely his of her career as well: for in a professional workplace one does not go over the head of behind the back of one’s immediate superior except in very rare and particular circumstance, e.g. being a whistle-blower if you have observed a breach of professional conduct or violation of the law. Such unprofessional behavior also has been committed by university administrators seeking to undermine particular faculty of departments for narrow political coups.

A culture of pandering to students and encouraging backbiting and undermining of your own faculty is both despicable behavior and a form of moral corruption of our students that in Athens would have merited either ostracism and expulsion from the polity or even execution. Pandering is a form of intellectual whoredom and launderers are whores.

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Panderers are whores*

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