Will teachers be packing guns in the future to protect themselves and their students. I rather doubt it. Without sounding sexist the majority of the teaching faculty are woman and most woman hate guns and have no desire to use them. Stopping guns in the schools is the job of the security guards. The problem is the quality of security jobs isn’t the greatest. They are paid low and usually retirees take the job. In these days and times someone needs to keep in touch with students and hear what they are saying.

Perhaps the best enforcers of security are the students themselves. After all they are on Facebook, twitter and all forms of social media and they learn of threats to their school first. Forming a student Leaders group to keep track of hackers and threats to the school might be the best idea?

Violence breeds violence. Bringing   up a generation of kids who play on electronic games all day and night breeds a generation who are shooting guns at nazis or monsters all the time. Guns become a game to todays generation. They have no sense of real fear with electronic guns. Some where along the line they take their father’s gun or buy a gun out of state and then the power of owning a gun goes to their head. They act first and think about the consequences later.

Schools have become very impersonal in the last decade. Teachers too suffer from being impersonal and not helping students or getting involved. There was a time that teachers really cared about their students, but today they have to worry about fake charges that they have a relationship with the student that is improper.

Technology has become a major tool in teaching if used properly. It is not all about Powerpoint slides but getting students involved with hands on research and writing. Reaching out to the real world and solving real problems is the challenge for the teacher of the future.

Teachers who become administrators must remember what it was like to be a teacher and not become an overruling lord.  It is amazing how in the cause of rules and justice administrators can bring the education process to a halt. Canned courses are cheap for school and colleges and students learn to teach themselves. Online courses threaten full time professor’s jobs. Once a college has a course filmed and written, they no longer need the Professor.

Money, money is all the matters for boards of education and administrators, yet in the end it is the administrators that get paid the most. Do they earn it? Rarely.  Some teachers would be better meeting students at a real business or public service and have them analyze how the business or pubic service operates like a Police department, water department, Mayors office, etc. or a large corporation or factory. Real education starts with a job setting, not in a textbook or powerpoint in school.

In the final analysis it is whether a school can get a student a job or prepare them to find a job. If students cannot get jobs after school, why bother to attend? Teachers need to keep their focus on reality and modern times. Even History professors need to apply the past to the future.

Lastly, the test made by the state will always be unfair to one minority or gender or another. State-wide tests focus on the average performance, not the best performance. They do not teach students to think. They only learn to memorize. Colleges teach concepts and High school memorize facts. Perhaps learning job skills and management should come before useless academic subjects which no longer relate to jobs in the modern world?

PKM