Matt Damon slams reporters while defending teachers

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Published time: August 03, 2011 17:46
Edited time: August 03, 2011 22:00

Matt Damon )Photo from http://www.mattdamonfan.net/)

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Celebrity, Children, Culture, Education, Movies, USA

What can make one of the most popular actors in America furious? Apparently it’s disrespect towards teachers.

The Good Will Hunting actor attended the Save Out Schools rally in Washington DC on Sunday with his mother, a teacher, and appeared offended when a reporter from Reason TV asked him if he thought teachers receiving tenure did not have the incentive to give their job their all. The reporter suggested Damon might work harder than teachers, since his job does not necessarily come with a guaranteed security. Teachers with tenure, however, know that they will always receive compensation.

"You think job insecurity makes me work hard?" questioned Damon. "A teacher wants to teach. Why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?"

Damon then fired back at a cameraman who lobbed a statistic that 10 percent of teachers were “bad.” When Damon asked him where he got that figure, the cameraman responded “I don’t know.”

The actor flew overnight from Vancouver to DC to attend the rally to stress the importance of education and passionate teachers. “I think you’re awesome,” he told the crowd in Washington.

“I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test . .. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here. I do know that,” said Damon. He attended Harvard University but did not obtain a diploma.

“The next time you turn on the TV and see yourself called 'overpaid;' the next time you encounter some simple-minded, punitive policy that’s been driven into your life by some corporate reformer who has literally never taught anyone anything. … Please know that there are millions of us behind you,” said Damon.

And for the hard-headed cameraman? Damon suggested the one-in-ten likelihood of him being a shitty cameraman.

Comments (11)

Inspector Fu 07.09.2011 08:03

Matt Damon reminding us all why no one should listen to him.

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Anonymous 13.08.2011 14:42

"Without good teachers, how will this country continue to produce citizens who can follow through with logical thought processes rather than those who spout ill-formed and uninformed opinions?"
contin ue?
As if the majority of Americans have well informed logical rational opinions...

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widge 11.08.2011 13:58

I've been a teacher for over 25 years and can assure you that MOST teachers teach because they care about their students. American teachers work longer hours with less pay than teachers in most countries in the world. It's not the promise of tenure that keeps them in this profession.

I cannot understand why so many people enjoy teacher-bashing.&nbs p; If you think that teachers are the problem, what do you think would make teachers better at their jobs? Policies like No Child Left Behind, low pay, lack of respect by the general public, funding cuts, impossibly large class sizes and unreasonable demands by the public domain certainly are not the answer. Tenure? Give me a break. That's about the only "perk" of being a teacher. And who has it, anyway? A handful of the thousands of teachers in the U.S. BTW, in all my years of teaching I have never known of a colleague who drinks or sleeps on the job b/c they have tenure.

Without good teachers, how will this country continue to produce citizens who can follow through with logical thought processes rather than those who spout ill-formed and uninformed opinions? And without offering good pay and respect, how will we continue to produce good teachers?

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