December 2, 2025
Crazy teachers, crazy principals, crazy country
By Mike McDaniel
During my teaching years, I was disheartened, but not surprised, to hear the occasional fellow teacher of another discipline proudly state they never read a complete book in college and hadn’t read a book since. I was even treated to that kind of willful ignorance by a few English teachers. It will surprise no one, I suspect, to learn my English Department had to deal with two assistant coaches “teaching” English.
If your eyebrows are rising, you’re on the right track. A coach/English teacher is as rare as a live dinosaur. A college professor of mine played the old joke on a class I was taking when he announced he knew the first name of the high school history teacher of everyone in the class: “coach.”
On the days they bothered to hold class, they commonly showed videos that had nothing to do with the curriculum, seldom asked kids to read or write, and handed back graded papers once or twice a semester if they handed them back at all. How bad was it? Their students were complaining about them! The kids wanted to learn something, but because they were coaches, they weren’t expected to really teach. It’s a rare graduate of the public schools who hasn’t experienced something similar.
Skip across the country to Echo Shaw Elementary School outside of Portland, Oregon, where Principal Laura Manning recently addressed the Forest Grove City Council:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/crazy_teachers_crazy_principals_crazy_country.html
