Hanging On for Dear Life

Gary Weibye grew up in a small town in Minnesota, was educated in small town public schools in Minnesota and Iowa and a small college in Nebraska, and taught English, Speech, and Drama in small town public schools in Iowa and Nebraska. At age 30, he moved to a huge city in Texas and taught high school English in a school system so big that he was allowed to work, undiscovered, for the next 27 years. In all, he participated in nearly four decades of educational "tinkering" that dumbed down the American public school. He worked alongside legions of well-intentioned, talented, highly-skilled educators caught up in a system of perpetual "gee whiz" experimentation. Each term, it seemed, he was able to require less and less of his students, as those students learned to require less and less of themselves. He found himself teaching elementary grammar to Seniors because they could not compose sentences. Meanwhile, he saw more and more classroom space converted to office space as bureaucracy replaced teaching. He retired at age 57 and is now writing about the problem--near a small town in the Ozark Mountains. He calls his affliction "Post-Teaching Stress Syndrome."Gary Weibye is the author of 'Hanging On for Dear Life', published 2004 under ISBN 9781594573484 and ISBN 1594573484.