Nation's Top Teacher Drops Resignation Bomb: "I Can't Drill 'em and Kill 'em"

Heather Callaghan

An award-winning, nationally recognized teacher gave a "mic-dropping" speech that ends with the announcement of her teaching resignation at Elyria, OH public schools.

Stacie Starr was not just any teacher, however. She was the number one finalist in 2014's “Live with Kelly and Michael” 'Top Teacher' award, a people's choice and enviable contest of sorts. It's like the "American Idol" for teacher contestants, and it drove her into the national limelight. This prompted many news segments to ask her how it felt to win that kind of recognition. In multiple pieces you can see her getting tearfully choked up at the honor, and calling it one of the greatest days of her entire life. Furthermore, she did not simply download information into her learning-disabled, at-risk students - she taught them how to think. That is why she was recognized!

That was near the end of the 2013-2014 school year, so for her to announce her resignation the following year, nowhere near retirement age, is astonishing and enough to make the greater majority of people to say, "what gives?" In the speech below, she will tell you exactly what gives.

But more than that, this speech is utterly heart wrenching because it erupts in tears of another kind.

AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?

Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga

Joe Bageant

If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?


But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.

As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"

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