Classroom Crisis

To the Editors:

Hey, young America: What do you want to be when you grow up? How about being a teacher [June 16]? After a B.S., an M.S. and 20 years' experience, you can make $18,000 a year, teach five classes a day, grade homework for 150 students at night, do bus and early-morning duty and attend extracurricular events after school. Plus you get to read, at least once a month, articles telling you how incompetent you are and what a lousy job you are doing.

Sounds terrific, doesn't it? Somehow, though, it is satisfying and it is rewarding.

Noureen Byrd

Grand Prairie, Texas

"Teacher burnout" indeed. What American education needs is more grit and determination and less weeping and wailing. Too many teachers have been coddled too long. Test every one of them. They should either measure up or flunk right out of the classroom.

Roberta Brown Sanders

White Plains, N. Y.

I have had it with verbal abuse, disobedience, cheating, apathy, and stealing of and damage to personal property on the part of those I tried to teach. You won't see me in September.

Edward Borucki

Southampton, Mass.

When I first glanced at your cover illustration with its title "Help! Teachers Can't Teach," I thought, "Oh, no, here we go again--another damning article on education." But I was pleasantly surprised. As a teacher, I want to thank you. You spelled out many of the existing problems of education very well.

Nancy W. Sears

Wellesley, Mass.

If there's anything the teaching profession doesn't need to add to its troubles, it's an article like yours--sure to encourage more parents to say, "It's O.K.,

Johnny. You don't have to listen to So-and-So. She doesn't know anything anyway." Thanks a lot, TIME.

Rebecca A. Young

Skowhegan, Me.

Every community should have full compulsory education from kindergarten to eighth, as well as courses for the gifted, normal and exceptional. From then on education should be voluntary, with one school for liberal arts and one or more for vocational, trade, shop or agriculture, depending on the community needs.

Richard L. Auten

Stratford, Conn.

I dream the impossible dream: a class of manageable size, students who read close to grade level, and parents who care.

Laurel Wasserman

Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

By their illegal strikes and defiance of court orders, teachers have helped create the climate of lawlessness that now haunts them in their own classrooms.

Robert J. McNaughton

Roslyn Heights, N. Y.

May I say that I would be most proud to teach down the hall from Helen Scott? I feel there is more than semantics involved when she refers to her class as "children" rather than "kids," and the individual as "a child" rather than "a kid."

Pat Grisak

Richardson, Texas

All you say is true, but you seem to have avoided one important and growing problem. That is the impossibility of teaching students who are high or low on marijuana, alcohol, or some other drug.

E. Jane Palmer

Grand Blanc, Mich.

There are no easy remedies, but it would certainly help if we abolished teacher tenure, and if we paid master teachers at least as much as we pay mediocre administrators.

Ruth Yule

Fly Creek, N. Y.

What American education cannot accept is that we are not all, in fact, created equal.

Carroll Swope

Canton, Ohio

Let's give competency tests to professors, especially those in the education departments. After all, they are the ones responsible for teaching teachers to teach.

Jill Yager

Melbourne, Fla.

Our public schools have become society's whipping boy. It's easier to say the schools are in trouble than to say we are.

Mary Fox Denver

Maiming of Mayors

Your pictures of the wounded pro-P.L.O. mayors [June 16] left me shaken. Why did you not place alongside them pictures of wounded Israeli soldiers, widows and orphans? Remember, this was an act of retaliation after many incidents in which the Jews were the victims.

Sarah Shoenig

Chicago

The barbaric bombing that left Mayors Karim Khalaf and Bassam Shaka'a permanently maimed is but the most recent example of the systematic Zionist campaign designed to eliminate the Palestinian leadership.

Emil Rafidi

Cleveland

Why doesn't Prime Minister Begin give his Nobel Peace Prize back?

Donald M. DuShane

Eugene, Ore.

Boost for Blacks

I agree totally with Jesse Jackson, who urges blacks to turn inward and help themselves [June 16]. Or has the idea that blacks are wards of the Government become so institutionalized that it is considered the sole responsibility of other Americans, also hurt deeply by our recession, to support them totally?

Jeff Larson

Raleigh, N.C.

I offer the following solution for the plight of the underprivileged trapped in big-city ghettos: Regard those families (or individuals) who are desperate for a chance to break out of their environment, and are willing to work, as ghetto refugees, and use the methods and tactics to help them that we offer refugees from other countries. Get churches and other organizations or groups in small towns to act as sponsors and help these people to become productive members of the community. This works with foreign refugees, so why not with native ones?

Mary C. Barton Rice

Hendersonville, N.C.

Volts Wagon

Yes, I'd buy an electric car [June 16]. But how do I convince American carmakers? I hope they don't wait for a foreign carmaker to market an electric car and have history repeat itself.

Dorothy Norton

Drayton Plains, Mich.

You estimate that electric cars will run more cheaply than the gasoline-powered ones. Wait until the state legislatures require the power companies to put electric meters in your garage where you recharge the batteries. Then we'll know how cheaply they will run. And how will they replace road taxes, currently collected on gasoline? The tax will be on your electric bill, or on the electric car when you buy it.

Robert J. Simon

Omaha

The problem with electric automobiles is not in perfecting the vehicles or their batteries, but in finding enough power to run them. Did anyone ever stop to think what would happen to a blackout-prone power grid if people started plugging in their automobiles--even at off-peak hours?

Bertram S. Rhodes

Walpole, Mass.

Clark in Iran

Ramsey Clark's offer to trade himself in exchange for the 53 hostages [June 16], if accepted, could have been the best deal this country has had since Alaska was purchased from Russia.

Jim Griffith

Cincinnati

Diogenes can rest in peace. An honest man has finally turned up in the person of Ramsey Clark.

Jean Phillips

Menlo Park, Calif.

The Rhythm of Africa

Your art critic's sneering remark that "the idea that Picasso had some sympathetic interest in African art as such is a complete illusion" is not surprising [May 26]. Of course great white artists can never be influenced by "savage" African art. More objective critics have, however, pointed out that Picasso didn't start to gain recognition until he started to plunder African art.

African art has always exerted and will continue to exert dynamic influence on world culture. One can do worse than quote one of Africa's greatest artists, Leopold Sedar Senghor: "Africa will teach rhythm to a world dead with machinery and cannon."

Adedeji A. Obe

Lagos, Nigeria

Show Time at the Grill

Your article "High Kicks Above the Big Apple" [June 9] hit close to my heart. I was part of the original opening act in the posh Rainbow Grill, July 12, 1935. Though my wardrobe was very revealing for the time, I take it from the pictures that accompanied the article that the wardrobe mistress has retired--or at least has less to do these days.

Marie DeVille Krack

St. Louis

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