HW 46

The book I read was "Academy X" by Andrew Trees. It is a true story about a private school teacher and all of his mostly horrid experiences there. He talks about his opinions on students and of teachers and just how messed up the school is, generally speaking. He tries to be a fair teacher and I personally got to see actually how hard it is to be a teacher and control a classroom. It really puts into perspective how different private schools are from public ones.
In the book,the parents basically run the school because they are on the board of trustees at the school, which I later learned was Horace Mann and put a lot of pressure on their kids to get into Ivy's and will do anything to insure that of happening-even doing dishonest things. If a kid gets in trouble, nothing happens because the parents just "buy out" the school in some way such as having an auditorium named after them and the dean and principal are on the parents side even saying "the parent is the best customer" meaning the teachers should treat the parents as if they are shopping in a store. This is a very crazy school system and the students do such crazy things and the teachers will try to punish the students but can't because the students know that nothing will happen to them. The kids are extremely undisciplined which I believe will probably hurt them later in life because as one grows older, less things they will be able to get away with. One case that was very huge was when the most popular and affluent student of his class named Caitlen claimed that the teacher raped her because he wouldn't let her get away with plagirizing a paper. She took off her top at the end of class and then took out a torn shirt and the principal came in and she ran over to the principal "crying" and made the torn shirt look like the teacher did it. The teacher believed the girl and wouldn't give the teacher a chance to explain himself. Practically the whole class was on the teachers side and knew he didn't do anything. He did have a minor, minor crush on the girl and thought she was beautiful, which is of course perverted but rape and a crush, especially in a student-teacher case is a very big difference.
This relates to my topic of how a school is run and what the teachers run the school and this book definitley gives a very different side of who actually runs this private school system. It is shocking to see that people can actually get away with these things. In this particular case, the teachers barely have any say in teaching because the parents tell them what to do through bribery. The tables turned and I really hate it because the teachers don't tell the parents how to run their jobs and neither should the parents. The purpose of school is to learn things but the kids who are on the poor side (middle class) learn more because they can't get everything at the drop of a hat by being bought into an Ivy whereas the rich kids know they can slack off and do whatever because their parents will just get them everything. I can relate this to my own public school experience how there aren't any super rich kids and you certainly can't buy your way into and out of situations and how there will mostly be serious problems if parents get too involved. Things are taken more seriously because everyone has an equal education.