Cheap shot
Cheap shot
For some time, I have found the cartoonists you have lately been featuring to be promoting negative, superficial views on various issues and public figures.
The worst, however, was (Tuesday’s) sketch of an overweight man snoozing in a chair and labeled, “Ineffective Teachers,” with a struggling student chained to the chair.
The many teachers I know have exhausted themselves through a long year, working harder than anyone else I know to reach all the many children who fill their classrooms.
They do this despite the many barriers put in their way by a society that seems bent on blaming all its ills on teachers.
There are the politicians who find it easy to call themselves “educational reform candidates” and who, as complete amateurs in education, promulgate one huge error after another. And there are media people who need an easy target so they can pull a paycheck for their day’s work — like (Tuesday’s) cartoonist.
This society is lucky to have any intelligent, good-hearted people willing to enter education, given its relentless bashing of their efforts.
In the Asian societies that often are held up as models of effective education, one striking factor rarely mentioned is the intense respect in which the teacher is held.
Granted, not every teacher is effective, but the vast majority are, and they labor on in the face of morale-destroying cheap shots such as the cartoon on your editorial page Tuesday.
You need to take a closer and more responsible look at what you are publishing, and you need to make an apology to a lot of very hard-working people, Hawaii’s teachers.
Martha L. W. Costa
Kurtistown
Verbal assault
Sunday was grocery shopping day. We decided not to get everything at Safeway, but “support local,” too.
As we were leaving a local shop, we were verbally accosted by a woman who did not like the stickers on my car window supporting my Second Amendment rights.
She kept calling us crazy haoles, telling us to go back where we came from because we don’t belong in “the land of aloha.” I repeatedly asked her to please stop yelling at us in front of our 5-year-old daughter.
She started yelling at my little girl instead; because, apparently, my child needs to know what kind of people we are.
“Your parents are crazy haoles who should take you back to the mainland where you belong because they’re murderers,” she yelled at my baby.
We might not be Native Hawaiians, but my daughter is a fifth-generation Hawaii resident and belongs right here, thank you very much.
How can someone scream that we are violating “the land of aloha” whilst calling us hostile, crazy, stupid haoles? All of this because our politics differ from hers.
Kimberly Arianoff
Hilo