Jeff Bliss

For those of you who haven't seen the video of a high school student in the red shoes stand up to his lazy teacher, check it out:

It turns out his name is Jeff Bliss and from what I've gathered is that he is a man who has been going through life learning from his mistakes. The path that builds the most hardened characters. And what I mean by that is not that he learned from the mistake of standing up against his teacher, but it has been made clear that he dropped out of high school for a year and learned the value of education. It was his greater appreciation for the importance of education, something that too many of us take for granted, that led to his outburst against his under performing and unsatisfactory history teacher.

For me, it makes me glad to see an event like this garner national attention. All you hear in the news regarding the schools in our nation are either rising costs or violence against each other. Never do we hear about students expressing their desire to learn; we yearn to be educated so give us the means to do so. In a perfect world, every teacher would be a source of inspiration, but we all know this is too idealistic for reality. But that doesn't mean the teacher can't be passionate! In the film The Passion Project there were an overwhelming number of students that believed a passionate teacher will inevitable inspire their students.

"Do I think a teacher should start going into the classroom with a vocabulary of passion? Absolutely, YES!" - Samira

"They should consider passion because how can they invest in the student if they don't know the student has passion?" - Emily 

"If a teacher can be motivational we can feel successful even after failing." - Ray

  "The teacher's job is instilling passion and I've had several teacher's who've done that, is constant communication with the students, constant reassurance."  - Emily

So like I said in a previous post: moderation. Balancing act. We don't need super-amazing teachers in every classroom, but we also don't want super-worthless teachers either. There should be an average of good teachers rather than poor teachers. I'm not saying that I have the answer to our continued slide down the international education index (we ranked average to below-average), but I feel like a broken record at this point by restating how important good teachers are. Rather than idly sit by and soak in your education as a means to an end, use your thoughts and experiences to improve upon it. Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Also, some food for thought regarding tuition prices in the upcoming years. Yeah, I'm pretty excited:

Good to know the politicians are on our side.