As a teacher at "South Philadelphia High School", the Asian students involved in the violence of recent weeks aren't the only victims. So are faculty and staff and not to mention, the taxpayers. Recent events had a deleterious effect upon all of the positive things happening at the place. Rules which often precipitate poor conduct need to be enforced religiously but are not and consequently, a once-proud house of learning has been reduced immutably to a house of lamentation. As such, I am quite confounded as to why central administration continues to glorify the idolatries of political correctness and diversity as societal goods. The educational experience of faculty and students alike has been marred beyond redress and so have the cascading arrays of accomplishment felt by teachers and students alike. These are perhaps the chief victims and those which all of our efforts should focus upon healing. Conciliation and reflection will not avail and in the darkness of the current state of things, now seem antithetical to the now bygone aura of moral rectitude which once reigned in the schools for generations past and present.
As a scholar, I long for these sweet dreams of yesteryear but such is not what the umbral taint of progressive left-wing lunacy hath wrought in our "classrooms" and still less in all the world. As a teacher, my colleagues need not ‘imagine greatness’ for it is within us and in our teaching -- in our classrooms and in all that we do. Be not alone and be not afraid. Do not allow the tumults and trammels of recent events to sell us short and above all, to settle for anything less than the moral grandeur to which we are capable. Be a union again. Be proud of who you are and in what you do. It’s not hard. This is the creed by which we as teachers, in such full measure, have propelled America on her path to greatness and by which we are called to serve. Live it!