| Profile | Events | Gear | Racks | Matches | Blog | + | Clips | Pics    

Tuesday January 9 2018 - Teachers and wrestlers	Some thoughts
In my travels, I have met quite a few wrestlers that are teachers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Quite the contrary, being a teacher has its perks. Most of them seem to use the summer term, the 2-3 months of vacation they have for free to go and travel off, meet new guys and wrestle. Sometimes, I wish I was also a teacher so I could roam around for several months at a time, but you know what, being in Information Technology has its own share of perks. There was this one particular teacher I met at one of the wrestling events that told me something that marked me still today. When I asked him if he enjoyed his career, he told me that his profession changed a lot within the years. This guy was teaching at the high school level. He told me that the blame has shifted from the student to the teacher. When a student fails a class, the parents used to say: "What did the student do and what can he do to improve or to pass the course?" Nowadays, the question they ask is: "What did the teacher do and what can he do to help the student pass the course?" He also told me that the kids are aware that a lot of laws are protecting them and many kids no longer show any respect to teachers. He would walk towards a student and that student would tell him out of the blue: "Get the hell out of my face." and there's absolutely nothing the teacher could do. I felt really bad for him. I could see the progression and the shift and change in values, how time transformed a wonderful job into a crappy one because parents put so much love in their kids that they become completely spoiled. And mind you, so many different careers have been transformed over time. It reminds me of one of my exes who had his shining days in the travel agency industry about barely 2-3 decades ago. Nowadays, who uses travel agencies anymore when you have sites like Expedia that do all the work in a fraction of a second? Back on the subject of kids, I'm not saying that these kids need to be slapped or anything, but a lot little less spoiling is a good start and that probably starts at home. One thing for sure, shifting the blame from student to teacher is definitely the wrong way to go. And sometimes, doing the right stuff will prep the kids and put them on the right track. A colleague of mine tells me that the first thing that they teach kids in kindergarten is that parents cannot hurt you in anyway. If they do, you can call the police and your parents will go behind bars. The kids go back to their parents and tell that in their face and the parents are scared and defenseless. My colleague enrolls his kids to take martial arts classes such as karate and the first thing these guys teach them is to respect their parents. On top of that, the kids learn not to use their self-defense skills on each other because they are lethal. They learn to use these skills sporadically and only when their lives are threatened. When I was younger, my mom would use a wooden stick to slap my butt and I would get a couple of slaps with it depending on the severity of my actions. Today, I tell wrestlers not to slap my butt because I had my fair share already. I still have somewhat some form of trauma about it, but I felt that it somewhat shaped me and oriented me in the right direction. Then again, I'm not saying this is right either, there's something in the middle that is just right. You can't be too harsh with your kids, nor too easy. Anyway, I just felt like ranting and mind you, this shouldn't be a thing I would ever need to worry about because I wouldn't want to have kids. I'd be a terrible daddy: always wandering off wrestling too many guys. I'd be to blame if my kids misbehave.
Blog ID 177