After reading the article, I have to agree with Corrie. As a person working in the school system, I think this really hit the nail on the head.
The turn over rate is huge at the school where I work and everything seems to be out of the hands of teachers. All you can hear is test scores, test scores, test scores. Teachers are over stressed with these tests and so are students. It does deeply concern me because I have children and my youngest will start school next August. I pray that some how there will be great changes for the better in the future. I hope that these changes will bring some fun and freedom for both students and teachers. It is my personal belief that learning can and should be enjoyable.

I also agree that this is a good article. There were many points that I agreed on him with such as, "We need teachers we never had" and "lecturing in cell block rooms". My high school felt like a prison. But in elementary school I had this one teacher that decorated her room like a circus tent and for every good deed you did you had a balloon up on the wall. It was sooo awesome! But eventually fire safety made her take it all down and there we were back to prison again. I liked the part about "you teach who you are". I had a hard time in school, took the SAT's many, many times. So I think I will be sympathetic to children who have test anxiety.

Finally, I also wanted to point out that I disagreed with any teacher who did things in the classroom out of the ordinary would be fired. One of the best teachers I have ever had was my 11th grade US History teacher. My class was obviously not the smartest one in the school, nor did we collectively have the most money, nor did we even care about learning. All we wanted to do was pass. But she incorporated activities such as dressing up for time periods we studied, we had to dress up too. We also made stamps, charicatures, sidewalk portraits of things we learned. I also had a chemistry teacher that year. Same class, same type. We died yarn from plants and other things and wove little patches which we made into one big quilt which we also incorporated into that same US History class. We made icecream and made/tested hot air balloons out of tissue paper to see how far down the highway they would go.

Both of these teachers did not get fired for what they did, but instead received many grants for continuing and extending our education.