To be a teacher, do you need to know how to write?

Sad to say it, but if I see a poorly written opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal, I can almost assume it is written by a teacher. It makes me wonder who is becoming a teacher in this state and whether they are being taught basic writing skills. Check out this article from a 36 year veteran from Las Cruces. For the record, I don’t disagree with the author’s point (I think) that you can’t operate socialized government schools via an artificially-imposed “business” model.

For example, what exactly does this sentence mean? “There is such a plethora of teaching programs and ideas out there as a great and beckoning alternative!” Or this one: “You cannot clone teachers whose creativity, ingenuity and freedom to experiment should reign and abound in the ambience of school and classroom.”

He finishes with a flourish:

“With our state’s particular and mostly similar demographics teachers could share their own creative programs and new ideas that work.
If the people of New Mexico and Susana Martinez are happy with this current situation, so be it. Sadly, then, we all are going to be stakeholders for the tent of educational despair and failure for a long, long time!”

So, in nearly 800 words, we’ve learned that New Mexico is attempting to operate the schools on some kind of “business model,” that this is supposedly unpopular with teachers and stifles their creativity, and that this guy who taught for 36 years can’t write his way out of a paper bag. Read the whole thing yourself and tell me if I’m wrong! I guess the good news is that he’s retired now and won’t be able to inflict his fuzzy thinking and poor writing on anymore students, but that is cold comfort when New Mexico is barely graduating 50% of its students from high school.