Things have been pretty good for me at school so far this year. All 5 of my classes have been good, and having 4 preps is actually a relief after last year’s 5 daily preps. I have two girls doing Independent Study in Advanced Calculus, one of them only a junior who is probably the best all-around student I’ve had in a dozen years many long-time readers know who that other student was; think Princeton).

Some of my teachers are not having as much fun as I am though, especially the teachers of low-level senior math classes. Many of those students had substitute teachers both their sophomore and junior years, so their classes were largely out-of-control and they neither learned how to behave in a math class nor developed very good basic math skills. This year they are serious behavior problems, so I tried to move a few of the discipline problems out of the classes since they are disrupting the learning of the other students. However, the supervisor refuses to permit it since she believes those students were cheated of a math education the past two years and we owe them this year. But they are depriving several dozen other students of an education by their constant disruptions, so who is really being cheated here? State law requires that students disrupting the learning of other students be removed from the classroom, but such disruption is taking place this year and nothing is being done about it.

I am a firm believer that selfishness is the root of most evil in this world, and that the greatest good for the greatest number requires cooperation and compromise rather than selfishness. Often that is not the case in education though, where the rights of the minority are allowed to trample the needs of the majority.