Walk a mile in a real teacher's moccasins!

I often make my way through this world as a consumer looking up and wondering, "Does the CEO of this company actually know that this is how his/her business is running right now?"

I mean do they fly commercial on their own airplanes like regular schmoes (I mean folks) like me do without warnings being sent to the flight crew that the big kahuna is on board so they better look sharp? Do they roll through their own drive-thru hungry for some dinner, have cable schedule a home repair that leaves them locked down at the casa for a nebulous 5 hour window on a weekday, or walk the aisle of their grocery store with a squiggly wheeled cart and then wait 10 minutes in the express lane for the lady with 17 items (in a 12 item limit line) to write a third party personal check from an international bank with only an expired library card as an ID to verify the purchase?

Do they? Do they? I swear, I doubt it.

Yet, they make those of us in the lower classes - like me - do it all the time.

So here's a proposal. I say we make every principal and every vice principal in America's public schools (grades 6-12) teach one class. That's right, let 'em teach one class.

They wanna know how the school is really operating under their leadership, let 'em have to walk a mile in a real teacher's moccasins!

Now obviously, this assumes that they could do it. I've had a host of principal's and VP's in my day and some of them seem like they surely could have stepped up and riffed cogently about direct objects and the such in a semi-intelligible manner. And then I've had others who seem like they'd have trouble unscrewing the dry erase marker cap.

Please don't ask which side outweighed the other, either. (But to be fair, those dry erase marker tops are trickier than they look.)

But really, could there be a better way to actually see what's going on at ground zero other than actually being at ground zero once a day? And none of this teach for a week nonsense. I am talking about taking responsibility for the education of 38 kids 1 time a day for 36 weeks. (Hey, they're asking me to do it 5 times a day next year.) Would the benefits of insight not greatly outweigh the problems of schedule for these folks? I men how can a person truly and effectively be an administrator if they have no idea what it feels like to be "administrated" by their own concoctions.

And really, would any school remain the same if this rule were introduced? Would NCLB not be entirely re-written if the folks doing the writing actually had to teach some real kids before, during and after they wrote and implemented this legislation? How would the national standards that are being written look if the people writing them actually had to teach each and every one of them to proficiency within the scope of one school year?

And ya know what, let 'em teach the honor's classes, I don't care. Those kids'll drive a person bonkers just as easily as a a person working with the "below proficient" kids will. You can't sandbag here. Put your boots on the ground for one period a day and walk the daily walk. I have a feeling it would create revolutionary change for the better.

I know many of these people used to do it. But now that they no longer have to do it, they seem to have forgotten what it feels like to be asked to a buncha things that don't really seem all that intelligent/practical/feasible and so on to do.

I figure at best, the dictates from above would show some empathetic common sense for what's going on below. And at worst, we'd at least be provided with simpler-to-open dry erase marker tops.