by Jase Graves

With school back in full swing, I’d like to say a few words about teachers, without whom none of us would know what in the heck to do with the word “whom.”

I come from a long-ish line of teachers myself. My mother taught elementary and middle school for over thirty years, and my grandmother also had a brief stint practicing the pedagogical arts.I guess you could say teaching is in my blood – like a serious infection. In fact, “pedagogy” kind of sounds like the name of a disease.

“I’m sorry, sir, you have an acute case of pedagogy, and I’m afraid we don’t have an ointment for that.”

Some folks may labor under the delusion that teaching is a relatively easy career – with short workdays, summers off, loads of holidays, and late nights praying fervently for catastrophic levels of precipitation when snow is in the forecast. (Ok, maybe that’s just me.) Sure, teachers may get a little more time off than some professionals, but they need these precious moments of psychological rehab to keep from setting their hair on fire and running naked through the streets – especially when snow is in the forecast.

Just think about all of the irritating behaviors and disgusting bodily functions that your children have inflicted upon you over the years. I can assure you that these outrages have been visited upon your children’s teachers, as well. Only, instead of dealing with two or three human larvae breaking wind and finding creative ways to refer to each other as the nether regions of various farm animals, teachers are saddled with up to thirty at a time – all while trying to teach them long division.

And I would know.

My own olfactory nerves were permanently damaged during my short tenure teaching junior high.In fact, back when I was in seventh grade, amid diagramming sentences, my friends and I used to see how often we could prompt our English teacher to pull out the Lysol within a 60-minute class period. By the time the bell rang, the room could’ve been mistaken for an overcrowded feed lot – with a hint of linen freshness.

Besides actually managing students within the fragrant confines of the classroom, teachers are also subjected to various other “duties as assigned,” including hall duty, bus duty, lunch duty, recess duty, carpool duty, and many other great big piles of duty. Have you ever spent some quality time monitoring a junior high school cafeteria? It’s a great way to lose weight (and your hearing). I call it the Food-Fight, Boisterous-Belch, Milk-Spew, Jell-o-Slurp, Giggle-Snort, School Cafeteria Diet. Once you’ve seen an eighth-grader hork down a cafeteria style French dip – a sandwich made out of a roll and everything else on his sectioned tray (dunked in chocolate milk), you may never bring yourself to eat again.

Now don’t get me wrong. Teaching does have its rewards. There is nothing quite like the joy of watching a child learn. Teachers have the privilege of introducing their beloved students to such important concepts as dangling participles (not to be confused with other offensive dangling things – like prepositions), the Shakespearean origin of the word “puking,” and algebra.

Teachers really are the unsung heroes in America. Sure, we all pay lip service to honoring teachers by force-feeding them enough desserts to send them into a carbohydrate freak-out on Teacher Appreciation Days, and we bring them tacky Christmas gifts like mugs, candles, and apple-shaped bath bombs that make them smell like they underwent a prolonged hot-cider baptism. (I’ll bet if my mom had lit all of her teacher-gift candles at once, they could’ve easily be seen from the Death Star.)But couldn’t a society that wastes $9.8 billion a year on gastrointestinal discomfort at Taco Bell do more to show our thanks?

While I don’t want to get into the debate about teacher pay, I can promise you this: Teachers aren’t paid too much, their insurance isn’t overly generous, and their retirement plans aren’t excessively lucrative.And if you need to see for yourself that teachers earn every cent of their salaries (and beyond), volunteer at your child’s school sometime. I’ll bet they could use you in the cafeteria.

FOOTNOTE: This article is posted by the City-County Observer without bias, option or editing.

If the confirmation process of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh revealed anything – and it revealed many things – it is that anger is no longer merely an emotion, it’s a strategy. Yell, push, bully, protest. Whatever it takes, as long as the desire outcome is achieved.

Protestors are now following orders and targeting Republican lawmakers. Far-left activists have cornered GOP senators on elevators and harassed them in restaurants and airports. Senators Susan Collins and Jeff Flake have received death threats.

“Get up in their faces,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said in June.

Indeed.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who had six of his ribs broken last year by an unhinged neighbor, and was hounded by demonstrators at an airport over the weekend, told Kentucky radio host Leland Conway that he now fears the worst.

“I fear that there’s going to be an assassination,” Paul said. “I really worry that somebody is going to be killed, and that those who are ratcheting up the conversation… they have to realize they bear some responsibility if this elevates to violence.”

You’d be inclined to dismiss Paul’s concerns as hyperbole if he hadn’t been at that ballfield where a gunman tried to slaughter several GOP lawmakers.

It would be understandable at this point to ask how we got here. But I’m more interested in where we’re going. Our kids are watching us. What are we teaching them?

I was walking down the street behind two women the other day. Suddenly, they both stopped as if they had come upon the edge of the Grand Canyon.

They stopped so quickly that I had to do a little pirouette around them, or at least what passes for a pirouette at this point in my life.

I looked back and thought, surely, one of them must be stricken and is fishing through her purse for an EpiPen.

I was wrong. It was selfie time.

I’m not sure what inspired the sense of urgency. We were walking in front of a Whole Foods. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Personal, anti-selfie indifference aside, the serial selfie trend is becoming more than merely annoying.

The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) recently conducted a survey that revealed 55 percent of facial plastic surgeons saw patients who want to look better in selfies in 2017, a 13 percent increase from the previous year, with many of these patients under the age of 30. The biggest issue for selfie aficionados was their double chin.

Researchers at Ohio State University study found that men who posted more photos of themselves online scored higher in measures of narcissism and psychopathy.

Apparently, a significant number of young people are actually willing to pay a plastic surgeon to cut on them just so they can look better in their Facebook or Instagram posts.

What does this have to do with our current political climate?

We’re raising a generation of young people whose self-worth, and the worth of others, is based solely on the external. Perhaps that’s why we hear so much about the need for diversity based on physical characteristics but we hear almost nothing about embracing diversity of thought.

But this shouldn’t surprise us.

We’ve allowed our children to live in an unreal world, where social media posts have taken the place of personal interaction. Our teenagers are isolated, disconnected from family, friends and faith. We tweet vitriol without accountability. We take grievances to Twitter and Facebook, not to find answers but to wound and ruin. We drown in debt so we can accumulate enough stuff to make us happy. The problem is it never does nor will it ever. The message we send is that there is joy in the external, but only if it meets our own relative standard for success.

There’s no need to wonder how we got here and why our young people continue their destructive pursuit of the ideal self.

It would be comforting to think our children will restore civil discourse. But the Kavanaugh circus has revealed our worst, and it would be a lot more comforting if our children weren’t learning from us.