Shortage of Teachers

The teacher shortage across the nation is getting more critical, following two years of an extended and mishandled pandemic which affected education in public schools significantly. Unions have made unreasonable demands for their teachers who did not want to teach in a classroom due to an irrational fear of death from a virus.

Some teachers quit because they refused to teach the divisive and racist critical race theory (CRT). Other teachers refused to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Students older than 12 were also forced to vaccinate against the highly ineffective Covid-19 injection to attend school and other school-related activities.

The teacher shortage is exacerbated by the license required by each state’s Department of Education in order to teach in public schools, even for seasoned teachers with a Ph.D. in a non-College of Education degree and a lot of years of experience teaching in higher education – they must have the approval of the vaunted Department of Education or else they are not qualified to teach.

Knowledge and content of a particular subject are not as important as a license. Due to the teacher shortage, licensed teachers are now teaching subjects they know nothing about.

The license, a piece of paper issued by each state, guarantees that the prospective teacher is good at making adorable and colorful bulletin boards and lesson plans - the paperwork with objectives must be completed, posted, and turned in to the administrators in a timely manner and placed on visible bulletin boards. Whether there is actual teaching and learning of those objectives in the classroom, that is a different story! And the students’ performance on standardized states proves the lack of learning.

The teaching profession has attracted students who had a harder time passing science and mathematics classes in college. Stronger math and science students were not interested in a College of Education degree because they knew that the pay was and still is lower when compared to employment with an Arts and Science degree.

Teaching has never been easy – it takes dedication, long hours, knowledge, and the pay is quite low. The school day never ends for a teacher at 4 p.m. The briefcase is full of papers to grade, lessons to plan, and reading materials to keep up with new developments, good or bad, required by the Department of Education.

I cannot imagine what must take place in most classrooms today! Judging by the woke teachers posting on TikTok, the situation in the elementary classrooms, with the most impressionable students, the teachers are bent on grooming kids into their depraved and delusional lifestyle. People with obvious mental issues oversee vulnerable kids.

Gone are the days when teachers were mostly positive role models, imperfect humans outside of the classroom. They came to class cleanly dressed, men were shaven, cared for their appearance, respected their students, and taught them how to be respectful to adults and peers alike.

Parents were sure that their kids would be safe in the classroom, would learn to read, write, do basic mathematics, home economics, learn life-long lessons of civics and citizenship, and skills applicable throughout adulthood.

Students were able to tell how many states form the United States, what the capital is, knew geography and history, the Constitution, their presidents, could write a cogent paragraph in proper and correctly spelled English, and knew their math tables.

Now students must spend time with social activism, social justice, learning Common Core math which reduces their performance on standardized tests even more; they must read sexually explicit stories, so explicit that the boards of education do not allow parents at meetings to read aloud the content of their children’s homework assigned by teachers following the Common Core curriculum.

Less than two decades ago, even without a college degree, high school graduates could read, write, do basic math, cook, balance checkbooks, could do simple math in their heads without a calculator, knew basic geography, basic history of their country, how to survive, fix a flat tire, change the oil in cars, cook, sew, learn useful skills in shop classes, raise a family, understood clearly the two biological sexes, and be respectful of life, born and unborn, and be generous and kind to others.

At the turn of the twentieth century, eighth graders could pass a difficult exam which most high school and college graduates today would be hard-pressed to even score in the lower fiftieth percentile.

In 2022, the pink haired, nose-ringed, lip-ringed, and heavily tattooed woke teachers are upset because they are not allowed to talk to their kindergarten and elementary school students about their sex partners, graphic sexual orientations, being transgender, and other immoralities. The mental and sexual baggage is so depraved that one wonders what is going to happen to our future generations exposed to such perversions in the classroom, often without parental knowledge.

It used to shock us when people with criminal records, liars, pedophiles, and habitual drunks became teachers and counselors in our public schools. Teachers who had sex with their underage students made headlines for months and years and they went to prison for their crimes against minors.

It was shocking to see college professors have steamy affairs with their students, yet nobody punished them in any way – liberals rolled their eyes and said, it was consensual sex. Never mind that the issues of professorial ethics and sexual harassment were not addressed.

It is now seen as tame for a public-school administrator to invite an imam to speak to students about the wonders of Islam shortly before his son and fiancé were caught trying to join ISIS. What exactly would American Christian students learn from such a speech that the attendance was made mandatory? And when did proselytizing for a non-Christian religion became compulsory in public schools? Liberals have been telling us for decades now that we cannot mix religion with public schools - we must be politically correct.

There is a shortage of teachers in our public schools because they have been habituated to “teach” from home in front of a computer and refuse to be in the classroom; they are afraid of a virus and want to wear a mask in perpetuity.

There is a shortage of teachers because the best, the brightest, and the most knowledgeable among them chose to leave the profession and pursue other ways to earn a living. With notable exceptions of the most dedicated and stellar teachers, the worst and the least prepared among the licensed ones chose to stay – they have few other avenues of employment.

There is a shortage of teachers because student discipline and behavioral issues caused by bad parenting or lack thereof have driven many teachers to renounce the profession. Administrators expected them to be first responders, doctors, nurses, counselors, and social workers, and to give students passing grades even though they had not earned them.

If you ask the National Education Association, the teacher shortage in all states can be explained by underfunding, poverty, and inequality. “Policymakers must take action to fix the underlying issues – underfunding, poverty, and inequality – that have dug us into the deep hole that we’re now in.” Teachers view the classrooms as “dangerous,” following the pandemic. “Teachers often have master’s degrees, even doctorate degrees, and yet they earn far less than other college graduates.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

The deep societal divide pushed daily by the mainstream media and Democrat politicians via their divisive policies is reflected in the classrooms. “Poverty, segregation, and inequality are huge issues, deeply embedded in American societies, and manifested in classrooms. Students come to school unprepared to learn, hungry or sick; parents have life circumstances that make it difficult for them to engage in their children’s learning; teachers’ safety and mental health is threatened.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

Societal issues reflect the sad reality that young generations now are not ready to be parents, have not learned how to be responsible adults themselves and are still relying on their parents for their survival. Some are hooked on drugs, alcohol, and on their smart phones, constantly taking selfies to post on TikTok, hoping that they will become the next Internet “influencer.”

Their role models are immature, entitled, narcissistic and whiny individuals, and are thus not ready to be parents. The main ingredient of a successful adult, personal responsibility, has never crossed their paths and lips. And their wild and misbehaved children, unfortunately, are now in the classrooms. Why would a low paid teacher deal with such parents and their children, in addition to teaching them?

Sadly, as a profession, teachers, good or bad, command little respect from society as a whole, even though they are the ones shaping America’s future by virtue of having your children’s ears and minds longer than any parent.

 

Energy, the Inept Socialist Way

The sunshine and balmier weather is giving some American people a reprieve from having to use so much energy to heat their homes as prices escalate due to the draconian measures the Biden regime had adopted on his first day in office – executive orders that shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, off-shore drilling permits, and drilling on federal land.

We had been an oil exporter during the Trump presidency, but we have become an oil importer from Russia during the Biden regime. This is not a good time to become dependent on such a  bellicose country which is now helping escalate the price of gas and fuel around the world.

Poor neighbors such as Romania have found themselves having to pay 450 euros for a month’s electric bill when the country’s average salary is 350 euros. How are poor people supposed to keep warm or find affordable fuel for their cars? Is an energy crisis looming?

Eastern Europeans are no strangers to energy crises or shortages. Cold winters and the inept Communist Party central planning brought power shortages, heat, electricity, and rationing of gasoline at the pumps. Americans have not had to deal with such problems in recent memory.

Drastically cutting back on energy and banning private cars in Romania, for example, in the frigid winter of 1984-85 did little to deal with the shortage of energy supplies. Mismanagement by communist apparatchiks, who did not know how to properly run the “socialist economy” and did not really care, reduced imports of everything and increased exports of gas and oil and Romania did not have enough energy and electricity for its own citizens.

The draconian measures to save energy, a severe lack of electricity, hot water, and heat in the communist concrete and steel blocks and very cold apartments (still in use today), factories, public buildings, frigid government stores, caused so much illness and death among the population, some of whom froze to death. 

According to David Funderburk, former Ambassador to Romania during the extremely cold winter of 1984-85, one in three babies died or were born severely malformed; many babies died in neonatal units when the incubators were unplugged to save electricity.  Old and young alike died from a scarcity of food and heat.

How did so many people live in cold and drab concrete 5-9 story apartments that were poorly built, heated, and electrified? The tyrant and his communists in power wanted to create the new socialist man and a new society, built back better, so he called for the destruction of private homes. If people were forced to abandon their homes overnight and herded into such high-rise and small space apartments, the state commissar could keep a better watch and a heavy boot on their necks, thus more easily controlling the citizens’ every move. The “new socialist plan” called for seizure of their lands for “the common good” and hundreds of thousands of private homes, with more space than the communist apartment blocks, were bulldozed.

The poor villagers and former farmers became dependent on the socialist state practically overnight. They could no longer get firewood in their village for heat or cooking, they had to beg the totalitarian state for their rations of timber, supplies of rationed gas, and supplies of rationed electricity.

And the communist lackeys did not stop just at destroying people’s homes. They destroyed their village churches and city churches, some of whom had withstood hundreds of years of history and turmoil. The totalitarian socialist state recognized 14 denominations but they called them cults.  (Armenian, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Lutheran, Reformed, Islamic, Jewish, Old Rite Christian, Pentecostal Evangelical, Presbyterian Evangelical, Seventh Day Adventist, Romanian Orthodox [the largest denomination], and Unitarian).

The communist tyrant did all this because he wanted to force the “passage from the bourgeois-landlord society to the multilaterally developed socialist society.” In this process he destroyed priceless historical monuments that could no longer be replaced. Destroying history, art and architecture, he destroyed the people’s identity, memories, and connections to their shared past, good or bad.  

In a not so distant future our American children will find themselves in a similar position when their connection to the past history will be forever altered or completely severed by the hordes of woke mobs. Right now they are just changing historical names of buildings and streets, removing classical books from libraries and bookstores, and destroying statues. Eventually they will erase their shared past completely and create a deceptive one.

After the destruction of so many churches, religious persecution followed. Children and grandchildren of religious figures, active churches members, and some of those who occasionally showed up for religious services, were discriminated against and some were jailed under trumped-up charges. People were charged with “serious misconduct of the socialist ethics and of the political and moral behavior” of the new socialist man.

If young people had relatives who had hunted down communists in the early days of the Bolshevik takeover of the monarchy, they were labeled in the socialist society as pariahs and nobody would marry them or their children. Dossiers followed them for the rest of their lives.

In 1972 and 1981, as part of a “good faith” offers, the socialist tyrant allowed equal shipments of Bibles translated into Romanian. Of the promised 20,000 Bibles, around 200 were actually delivered to churches. The rest of the Bibles were poorly recycled into toilet paper made at a factory in Braila. I had some of that toilet paper in my hand one day – words from the Bible were still visible on the badly recycled paper. That is what Christianity and its Bible meant to the communists and still does today.

Small mountain villages, where the communist party had not fully inserted itself and forcibly collectivized the farmers, experienced their tyrannical handprint anyway– there was no electricity, heating oil, gasoline, running water, or medical care. Church services and people’s modest homes were lit with candles or oil lamps. Heat came from firewood when available. The sad reality was that my paternal and maternal grandparents only lived 24 miles and 6 miles respectively from the seven largest refineries in Eastern Europe at the time, yet they only got electricity sometime in the mid-seventies.

Do we really want to go this painful route of scarcity, high prices, and rationing, in the name of green energy, solar and wind, that is not enough to service a large economy and 340 million people?

Western nations like Germany have learned a hard lesson from expensive and unreliable green energy, and are quietly and slowly reverting to fossil fuels as their brown-outs and high prices have taken a heavy toll on their respective economies.

 

Mr. President, Can We Return to 'Made in America' Again?

On March 9, 2020, I flew back to D.C. The flight was more than half empty which was quite unusual – all flights to D.C. have been running at full capacity prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now remaining flights are almost empty with demand down in some cases by 96 percent.

A month later I wrote an article asking President Trump to open up the economy as it became more evident that the supply and delivery chains have been severely disrupted by the draconian quarantine-driven lockdowns of individual Democrat states, lockdowns which are yet to be lifted partially or fully. This resulted in closing small American businesses, the bread and butter of our economy. https://canadafreepress.com/article/open-up-the-u.s.-economy-as-soon-as-possible

Usually a quarantine is established to separate sick people from the healthy and, as the word says, it is meant for 40 days. But the state governors have decided to lock down healthy people, beyond the 40 days, with plans of more in-home confinement, robbing them of their freedom of assembly, religion, speech, and freedom of movement.

With 30 millions out of work and fudged death numbers from Covid-19, the hysteria has built up to the point where people are afraid to even get out of their homes without a mask, much less go to work.

Unemployment checks, ginned up fear and panic, bailouts, and forced government closures of businesses based on random decisions of “essential vs. non-essential” have further exacerbated the problem of returning to work. Social interaction has become evil in less than two months of constant government PSAs on TV, radio, print media, and grocery stores.

Salesmen in America used to travel around the country to small towns USA in the 70s-80s and found every little town with a town square with stores and factories around the town where people would be employed. Those factories sit empty now, victims of the production exodus to the Communist China or the buildings have been razed to make room for some other development. In light of the Covid-19 manufactured crisis which is destroying the world’s economy, the obvious question must be asked, why can we not build things in America again?

There are many products in short supply right now but freezers, upright and chest type, are something that we never thought would be hard to find. One store offered to order a freezer but it would not arrive earlier than June and, if things do not improve, it may be August or later.

A local owner of a furniture appliance store said that “there are no freezers, there is a national shortage.” An order could be placed but the supplier suggested the earliest tentative arrival as the end of May or June.

Then the  owner launched into a discussion about what is going on in this country and how wrong this shutdown is. He said, that if the mayor had told him that he had to close his shop (a business he has built over decades), he would have gone to jail rather than close his store. He was of the opinion that shutting down the country and businesses is completely ludicrous.  He also added that most who come into their store ask if the appliances are made in America.

In a 2015 Consumer Report recommendations for best freezers, about half of them were made at the time in the U.S. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/05/best-american-made-appliances/index.htm?EXTKEY=NW0N01506

In a 2019 interview, Marc Blumenthal said that “an Amana chest freezer and a Maytag upright freezer are made in Ottawa, Ohio.” https://www.cleveland.com/business/2015/06/ohio-built_appliances_are_among_the_best_made_in_america_consumer_reports_says.html

Should we as consumers put pressure on suppliers and store owners to have more made in America products and parts? Is it right to export most of our manufacturing to an inimical country, one ruled by the Communist Party at that, when it is not in our best interest?

If you can’t find a freezer right now and you wish to purchase one, perhaps you should join a grassroots campaign to bring back more manufacturing to America under American ownership.

There are many former manufacturing hubs around the country where factories are sitting empty. Can't Americans who have the know-how re-purpose old factories? President Trump has certainly advocated so for a long time. America needs to manufacture its own products, especially key industries for our nation’s security such as defense, steel, medical equipment, computers, pharmaceuticals, meat packing, vitamins, appliances, and other essentials for our food supply.

These are unintended consequence of a Chinese produced Covid-19 crisis. We have allowed China to control manufacturing in the U.S. of formerly Made in America products. For a list of products still made in America check here and the reference list at the bottom of this article. www.americanmanufacturing.org

In order to return manufacturing to the U.S., we must train a better skilled workforce. Not everybody needs to go to college to get an unmarketable degree in social and racial justice for which there are so few jobs. It is noteworthy that you prefer justice to rule the world but can you feed and shelter your family with a worthless college degree? Many technical and manufacturing jobs pay so much better and you don’t have to spend your parents’ life savings on expensive college tuition. And there is always huge satisfaction at the end of the day for a skilled job well done.

Made in the USA reference list:

https://www.actforamerica.org/made-in-usa

https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/made-in-america

https://www.madeinamerica.co/pages/thelist

https://madeinusaforever.com/

https://stillmadeinusa.com/kitchen.html

https://americansworking.com/guns-made-in-the-usa/amp/

https://anytownusa.com/

https://www.everythingkitchens.com/made-in-the-usa.html

http://www.strictlyusa.com/

https://www.themadeinamericamovement.com/made-in-usa-companies/

https://www.usalovelist.com/

https://arisindustrial.com/made-in-usa/