Fairness

Here is a post about fairness from the blog, "Books, Bytes, and Grocery Store Feet."

In a nutshell, the author is averring that life is not fair. In particular, every person, every student has different educational opportunities depending on luck: whether their parents are rich, etc.

My favorite line from the article is:

One thing I’ve always noticed about educators is most of us seem to have a two year old’s desire for things to be “fair.”

I have noticed this myself, that many teachers are obsessed with making life fair. They want things to be fair in their classroom, fair for all the students.

Moreover, many teachers want all the teachers in the school to be treated equally. If one teacher is doing one less recess duty than everybody else, then it's an outrage.

I am guilty of this insistence on fairness myself.

Concerning the unreasonable need for fairness, I can see that it is rather silly, insofar as it is generally very short-sighted and ego-centric. I am concerned that the teachers who work in the same school as me are treated the same, yet, I do not care about the millions of people who get paid more than me to work less and I do not care about the millions of people who work harder than me and receive less.