Roibin, I have to say that I understand where you are coming from, but do not totally agree with you. I am a 22 year old graduate student and a substitute teacher who, hopefully one day, will be a "real" teacher. I've learned so much in the past 5 months that I have been a substitute. (1) Teachers who do their job on a regular basis often forget what it is like for those just starting out. I have had teachers who leave no lesson plans and then complain that I didn't follow the lesson plans that they didn't leave. (2) Teachers may deserve the summer off, but so do many other working class people who make a whole lot less than teachers. (3) Society, not only teachers, blame children for their short comings. Well guess what, most of the kids that are labeled "bad" or "unmotivated" or whatever label is given them have had horrible childhoods. They've either been abused or neglected in some way, probably since they were born. How can we as a society expect children to grow up to be "normal," healthy, productive citizens when many of them can't recall a single happy moment from their childhood? Society spends much of its anger and disallusionment about education blaming the kids. They're disrespectful, arrogant, rude, have no motivation, no respect for others, etc. Stop blaming the kids and look at what they come from, who their parents are, who their grandparents are. Somewhere along the line, long before now, parenting dissolved into the job of the public school system which is poorly equipped to deal with such monumental frustrations. I've seen parents who seem to not only expect their children to fail but to want them to do so. For the past week I've been substituting in a special program called TLC, Theraputic Learning Center. Now I have to say that little about the program is theraputic and even less about learning. These kids, and their teachers, are literally put in a corner and forgotten about. They have no money for supplies and very few textbooks. But if you spend any quality time with any one child, you can easily see that they want to be "normal." They will work if you praise them, something they get so rarely, even for participating. Deep down these kids are severely psychologically wounded and maybe learning all the U.S. Presidents and what kind of food rabbits eat is not the most important thing.