John Merrow released this post on April 1 but my page was already full, and anyway the post is not a joke. However, if you read it—and you should—you will spot John’s humor.
He begins:
Although I left reporting more than four years ago, my blood still boils when people like Betsy DeVos, the supremely unqualified Secretary of Education, Senator Rand Paul, Representative Steve King, Laura Ingraham of Fox, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, convicted but pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza, and other uninformed public figures blast public school teachers and public education.
Because I’m retired, I have time to dig for the truth. And so, to find out how real Americans feel about public school teachers, I decided to go to the grassroots. Do ordinary Americans respect teachers more than they respect lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, and politicians?
I’ve devoted the past seven months to original field research on this subject, and I am releasing the results today.
A quick summary: Americans care deeply about public school teachers. And at the bottom of their list: politicians!
Please read to the end to understand his extremely unorthodox method of collecting data!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is an amusing tale about Merrow’s CRAP. It is fortunate that he didn’t hold up a sign that read “Retired Journalist.” He might have been roadkill for one of the president’s fanatic followers that believed they were doing a public service.
My thought is similar—what if some one hated teachers and picked him up with intent to do harm?
“…my blood still boils when people like Betsy DeVos, the supremely unqualified Secretary of Education, Senator Rand Paul, Representative Steve King, Laura Ingraham of Fox, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, convicted but pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza, and other uninformed public figures blast public school teachers and public education.”
I know I harp on this all the time, but why didn’t his blood boil when Michelle Rhee did the very same thing? In fact, it made him swoon. I know he later distanced himself from her, but he has never accounted for let alone apologized for promoting her and her broom in the first place, including his horrific filming and airing of her firing a principal for public consumption. I’m all about second chances and I welcome it when people rethink and change their minds. But Merrow continues to pretend he was on the right side all along when his record clearly shows otherwise.
best line with the best word: “WHY didn’t his blood boil….
Maybe he was under a lot of pressure at the time.
(Science humor)
Now tell that to the states and districts, who are making teachers meet in person, risking our health, or meet virtually every and and record the meetings, or doing other micromanaging that increases our workload and stresses teachers out for no reason, because somehow we cannot be trusted to do the work.
I am not sure I believe that Merrow did the hitch hiking gig. Less sure that this is not all satire, even though I read the post and his mighty oaths to the reality of this matter.
I picked up a hitch hiker in the Bronx back in 1980 or so. It was midnight and I was lost. I could barely understand the guy, but he alternately tried to get me to buy him a beer and to convert me to Christianity. I told him I would be glad to let him out wherever he wanted but I wanted directions out of town. It was a cool March night, with steam rising from the streets, giving the feeling of a post-apocalyptic movie set. I put him out on 42nd, and he disappeared into the steam as I turned into one of those tunnels that emerges in New Jersey.
I really did that. If Merrow did half of what he said he did at a younger age, he has me beat.
It was nice when one could hitchhike safely. Used to do it all the time. Sometimes by choice, others forced by cars to do so.
In the January of 74, I believe, we were at a get together at Mizzou. We hadn’t had any snow all year so we decided on the spur of the moment to drive out to Colorado (a twelve hour drive) to find some snow. So about 10 of us piled into a Chevy Vega and a VW Bug. Went out, found some snow and had some fun. But a blizzard we had passed under had developed in KS and headed for MO. So on the way back we ran into that blizzard, 8-10″, a foot of snow.
In Topeka the Vega’s engine block blew. The rest of my travelers had enough $ for a bus ride. I didn’t, so I got out and started to hitchhike back to Columbia, MO. Wearing my Peruvian wool ponche and earflapped cap-what a sight to be seen. Got a quick ride to the west side of KC when a Jesus freak, really nice guy, picked me up and took me to his home and fed me-his wife had made a pot of chili. Then he took me to the east side of KC into MO. That’s when the real fun began.
I got picked up by two scraggly looking guys and a similar looking gal driving a 61 Impala with TX plates. We get rolling and on the news a story comes on about a hitchhiker being killed in Iowa the day before. A guy in the front reached up to the dashboard and held up a railroad spike with tape on it for a handle and said something to the effect that it was a handy tool for having some fun.
Well, needless to say that caught my attention. So. . . I said to them “Hey I got some hash, you all want to get high”. I figured it would mellow them out. Well it did that and a little more as before I knew it we were doing 360s in the snow and ended up in the median, no real harm done. A few minutes passed when the driver looked in the mirror and saw a state trooper with flashing lights coming down the highway. The driver asked if I had a driver’s license. I said that I did and he had me switch places, none of them had a license.
Well the officer wasn’t interested in a single vehicle in the median as there were plenty of other more major problems in the blizzard so he went by. Seizing the opportunity, I grabbed my backpack and jumped out, ran to the highway and started to hitchhike again. A trucker picked me up and took my to Columbia.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.