The Joy Of The Education System

I have, for a while now, worried about some of the standards of teachers in local schools. I wouldn't trust some of them to boil and egg, let alone prepare children for work and life in the outside world.

I encountered a teacher today (and on previous days), who apparently teaches electronics to his children. He does not appear to be an intelligent man, but thats possibly because he hardly speaks english. This alone bothers me. How can you teach children if they can't understand you? But thats an argument for another time, in another place.
My problem is with the questions he asked me, and the information he couldn't give me. Put simply, he needed a resistor for a circuit he was building for his class. He couldn't tell me what value he needed, and there are quite a few different values, which makes guessing impossible and inadvisable.
This alone is mildly worrying. What is seriously worrying is that he expected me to know. He expected me to be able to work it out for him (i could have, but he still didnt give me nearly enough information to work with) and tell him precisely what he needed, as he wasn't capable. When i explained i couldnt do this with the information he was giving me, he told me i should know because 'you're the professional'.
What?

At this point i had to point out that i wasn't, in fact, a professional. I told him 'Sir, i'm a shopkeeper who gets paid minimum wage, and therefore doesn't recieve any training. You clearly earn a lot more than me, and you teach electronics. You should be telling me what you need, not the other way around.'
Now i ask you: if you had/have children, would you be happy to know that their teachers were getting all their information from a slightly angry, minimum wage earning, untrained shop assistant? The fact that i could have worked it out for him if he had given me a little more information is irrelevant. It's not required of me to know, i've just learned from other people. I'm almost certain a teacher should be better trained than that.
And of course, let me look at some other facts:
- I speak better english, and more clearly than he does
- I appear to know more about electronics than he does
-I'm hoping i smell better than he does
-I don't need something repeated to me five times before i listen to it
-If i need something, i generally know what it is i need before i buy it, through prior study and research.

So why does he get the flashy car, and i get to take a bus? What went wrong here? If i'd known it was that easy to get a degree, i would have certainly gone to university, but i seem to have mistakenly believed that to be a teacher you needed to be, y'know, really clever?

It seems i was wrong. And that makes me a little angry, not for me, but for those poor kids who can't possibly be getting a proper education.

Signs Of A Healthy Mind... I Hope.

It's entirely possible that you're sick of retail:

- If you spend your free time imagining various ingenious deathtraps in which to ensnare your customer before they could reach you.

- When viewing the cluster of customers gathered around the counter, and approaching you from other parts of the shop, your are instantly reminded of that zombie movie you saw once.

- When not at work and actually going to a different shop, to buy things yourself, you find yourself trying to avoid the other customers in case they want to ask you something.

- When at another shop, the sound of their telephone ringing both annoys you and fills you with an overwhelming need to answer it, or at least throw it at something.

- When you start avoiding normal people in the street, because you fear they are going to want you to serve them.

- When you've trained your brain to ignore customers while they talk endlessly on, and only switch on when certain key words are spoken.

- If you posess the desire to give someone a serious electrical shock via the telephone they're using to bother you right now.

- If you wish you could install some device onto the door, so that customers would have to pass a basic intelligence test before they could gain entry, thus permanently barring 90% of your customers, who have the mental capabilities of a sock puppet. Or a piece of lumber.