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Sounds pretty much like a hypothetical, right?

Sure, not everyone was a calculus or physics major. Hell, I had to spell them three times just to finish the sentence.

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And I don’t know if you’ve been privy to the latest kerfuffle about ‘the classics’ not only, say, Shakespeare or translations of The Illiad, but anything pre-1970! 

Some of the younger teachers want them ‘translated’ into ‘modern speak’ so the youths of today can appreciate a good story and not overtax their wired brains too much, having to get the rhythm of older lingos.

IT’S TOO DENSE

I am not sure if he meant the books or the attitude.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit being forced to read The Scarlet Letter or Silas Marner was literally a fate worse than death, but there are tons more accessible, truly engaging works if someone: 1) exposes kids to them, 2) helps them learn to read.

How can a 10-year-old who loves to read not go crazy for Henry V if he has a chance to see Branaugh’s masterpiece? Swords! Battle! Horses, knights, and a king who smacks a smart-ass cousin down hard.

TENNIS BALLS, MY LIEGE

What’s not to love? The menace is palpable. But you have to be exposed to it to want to know more.

That exposure leads kids to other books, other centuries of authors, and so many other adventures for the mind.

But again, they have to be able to read. They have to want to read.

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So many children these days are growing up without that love of reading, and it breaks my heart. I know parents are busy, but I can’t imagine they were any more stressed than we were as two active-duty Marines. Yet we read to Ebola every night, and when his dad was away in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, reading kept the war out of the living room for a while at night. 

Instead of watching TV, I read him The Hobbit and the entire Ring Trilogy (except those damn Tom Bombadil songs – we both agreed to skip those) over the course of that ten months or so.

Books. Great books, which I’d enjoyed and was now handing down – sharing with my son. 

I guess it backfired in a way because his pack out when he has to PCS runs overweight routinely because of hundreds of pounds of books. Every station library makes out with his castoffs, but, oh. Doesn’t it kill him to have to leave them behind.

Great books. Good readers.

Where do good readers come from? From parents who love to read and make sure their children love reading.

From teachers who encourage reading and schools that challenge minds, which ‘translating’ anything pre-1970 into modern argle-bargle doesn’t.

I remember all the teachers who had to put up with me in New Jersey public and private schools, every last one. Sure, they had their strengths and weaknesses as human beings, but they all knew their stuff. 

That was a given.

Which is why this move now, signed into law by verminous Gov Phil Murphy, baffles me to no end.

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How does this benefit children and their education?

New Jersey is rumored to ‘need more teachers.’ This certainly makes it easier for people with degrees in certain subjects to teach specifically those subjects. But is that really what’s happening?

 …New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education. Candidates still do, however, need to pass the Praxis Subject Tests that are specific to their degree.

“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”

Just a few months prior, Murphy also signed a similar bill into law that established an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement. According to Read Lion, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), a teachers union that is associated with the National Education Association (NEA), was a driving force behind the bill and called the testing requirement “an unnecessary barrier” to those who want to teach but may not perform well on standardized exams.

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Or is it true that the teachers’ union needs more teachers, which is not the same thing at all?

…Erika Sanzi, former educator and current director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, a national grassroots organization, spoke to the National News Desk about why she is against Act 1669.

“It’s important to know that the teachers union, specifically in this case, the NEA, pushes really hard for this. I’m a former member of the NEA in two states. Generally, whatever they push for, tends to be something that’s not particularly good for students,” said Sanzi. “The NEA wants to eliminate all barriers to teaching because that increases their number of dues-paying members, and when that’s your mission, student learning and quality control really aren’t priorities at all and so that’s a concern, for sure.”

Sanzi says she took a similar test in Massachusetts in 1998 to get her teaching certification and that removing the requirement will hurt both students and teachers.

“These are low-rigor tests. We’re not talking about the LSAT here. So the fact that the failure rates on these tests have been so high for so long, that is a problem. That’s really an indictment of not only of the education system that these aspiring teachers are coming out of but the colleges of education that give them a degree even though they’re not remotely qualified,” she said. “Teacher shortages are real in some subjects, that is true, but eliminating the test requirement, in my opinion, does not bode well for students who are still trying to recover from massive learning losses during the pandemic.”

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Well, hello. And if you need to see any more proof of where the National Education Association (NEA) focus is, try sitting through this minute and a half of their president last spring.

Not one word in her complete 28 minute whatever that was about student learning loss.

And as far as needing more teachers, that assertion’s up for grabs, too, as the state has been losing students.

The state hasn’t come close to regaining its pre-COVID educational metrics and the city kids have fallen by the wayside.

…Third graders’ reading proficiency statewide remained at 42%, the same as last year — and 8 percentage points lower than the 50% rate in 2019. All other grades that took the reading exam, though, showed at least a 1 to 4 percentage point improvement over last year.

Similarly, seventh graders’ proficiency in math remained at 34% this year — 8 percentage points behind the proficiency rate of 42% in 2019 — and the Algebra 1 proficiency rate went unchanged from last year at 35%, also 8 percentage points behind the 2019 rate. Again, all other grades that took the math exams showed some improvement between 1 and 6 percentage points over last year.

“When we disaggregate based on grade level, this is when you’re starting to see some differentiation,” Schiff said.

Newark third graders’ reading proficiency rate of 19.1%, an improvement of .1% over last year, was still 9 percentage points behind 2019 and 22.9% behind the state’s average.

…Forty-two percent of third graders at Ann Street, 46.9% at Ivy Hill, and 50% at Sir Isaac Newton elementary schools are proficient in reading. But at other schools, the third grade proficiency rate is bleak — with Hawkins Street elementary at 1.6%, Quitman Street at 1.9%, and Dr. E. Alma Flagg at 2.6%.

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Maybe the state should be paying more attention to teachers proficient in the basics, don’t you think?

Less than 2% of third-grade kids in a school can read at grade level. Someone should…well. I can’t say it, but their teachers should be the damn best in the state, not someone who can’t pass their own reading test.

What are these teachers going to be ‘teaching’? There’s a scary thought, too.

You can’t get those young brains-are-a-sponge years back, ever.

Not everyone will want to read Shakespeare or Marcus Aurelius or even Edgar Allen Poe. 

But they should know who they are and be able to take a whack at them if they want to. 

A child in a school where 1.9% of third-graders read at grade level and now whose teachers don’t even have to be ‘proficient’ readers themselves doesn’t stand a chance.

It’s unconscionable to me.