[manaboutown]

My daughter-in-law taught first and second grade in small Idaho towns for about five years. She found the children unruly and their parents uncooperative. She burned out after a few short years. I can't imagine what it would be like to teach in an urban school. One cousin's husband told me he was going to teach in a Baltimore City low income area school after he retired from the government. He drove me by it one day, looked like a prison building in a war zone. I didn't think he could handle it but said nothing. I don't know how it all went down but that never happened. He ended up teaching in an exclusive private school. At age 81 he still volunteers there a couple days a week.

It has been getting worse for many years. In the late 1970s a classmate friend from high school visited me in our home town. He had a much older brother who taught math at our junior high. His brother and the shop teacher retired the first day they could and when asked why said the kids had changed. They were middle class - upper middle class kids for the most part, too.