Confessions of a Public School Teacher

There was once a time, even in my professional life, when Americans generally held positive views of the teaching profession.  Shocking, I know.  Sure, the paltry salaries teachers earn, at least relative to our educational levels, was a national joke, but we were at least respected by most as performing an honorable, if often thankless, role for society.  Very few begrudged us our pensions and benefits; after all, why shouldn't teachers have a decent retirement, the sentiment went, it's the least we as a society can do to compensate for their lousy pay.  I cannot recall frequent derisive comments about the scourge of teachers' unions or sneering condemnations of tenure laws. No one referred to public schools as "government schools," which conjure up images of grim North Korean brainwashing institutions. Sure, everyone had tales of lousy teachers.  There were the teachers who showed movies all the time in class, or the ones who sat at their desk and read the newspaper or slept while the class descended into a scene from Lord of the Flies.  Even worse were the one or two teachers in everyone's life who had no business being around children; the teacher who would rule by terror and often fly into fits of apoplectic rage, those who would mock or humiliate their students, and, much rarer, those who were actually physically abusive. Such monsters and derelicts of the classroom were rare, though, and loom large in our psyches due to their scarcity, just as the few brilliant, inspirational teachers do.  Most teachers, like every other profession, fell somewhere between these two poles.  The vast middle were competent, unremarkable teachers who did their jobs, were professional in their work and human interactions, and neither inspired nor hindered their students.  Ah, those were the days.

So fast forward to 2014, and the script has been thoroughly flipped.  Teachers are overpaid, considering we, ahem, get off at 3:00 every day and only work 180 days out of the year.  Do I really need to debunk this one?  If the knuckle-draggers who manage to bang out their rantings in the comments section of every news or political website's articles on education are any indication, I do.  I work every weekend, and spend most Sundays in my classroom preparing for the week.  On weekdays I get home around 5:00 or so, feed and walk my dogs, take a half-hour nap to recharge, if I can, eat dinner, and then grade to around 10:00 or 11:00, crash, get up around 5:00 the next morning, and start the whole cycle all over again.  This after the physical and mental exhaustion of trying to teach some English to a classroom full of thirteen and fourteen year old middle school students who are riding a roller coaster of hormonal mood swings.  For this, I am just now earning the same salary after nine years in my current position that I was making over a decade ago as an administrative assistant-yes, a secretary-for one of the "Big 5" consulting and accounting firms where I would finish my work before noon and spend the rest of the day in my cubicle trying to look busy.  

Yeah, cry me a river, you get all that time off; summer vacations, winter and spring breaks, every holiday under the sun.  Well, as I write, I am on spring break.  Sure, I'm spending part of that time ranting into the void of cyberspace, but I have worked every day of the spring break.  I have graded, lesson planned, and gone to my classroom every day this break, as I do over Thanksgiving and winter breaks, too.  I have also put quite a bit of work into my application for grad school, which I hope to start this fall.  This summer I will reflect and revise many of my lessons to align with the Common Core State Standards.  Previous summers I taught summer school and led a camp for young writers.  Now I know not every teacher puts in these hours, but I also know I am hardly unique in doing so.  

That pension that was once viewed as society's way of alleviating the collective guilt over teacher's lousy pay? That same pension is now responsible for bankrupting municipalities, states, the nation; heck, it's responsible for the entire global economic meltdown. Not Wall Street hucksters in cahoots with the banking giants coming up with voodoo derivative schemes.  Not huge multinational corporations buying enough politicians and dumping their money offshore so that they pay only nominal taxes, if they pay any at all.  Not the 1%, who as recently as the 1950s paid a 90% income tax rate but now are assessed at a rate lower than the guy who cleans their offices.  No, it's old Irv Stempel, retired science teacher in Rockford, Illinois, and his $40,000 a year pension who is responsible for the high unemployment rate, job offshoring, Russia's impending invasion of the Ukraine, and the missing Malaysian jet.

Then there are those evil teachers' unions!  Unions, grrr! Nothing gets an American's patriotically red blood boiling these days like the mention of unions, but especially teachers' unions.  Why those union thugs like Mrs. McGonigle, your third-grade teacher, they're only interested in protecting those fat teacher salaries and sweet, sweet benefits while Johnny and Susie can't even read.  While in most professions experience is seen as an asset, in teaching it's the opposite.  Thanks to the unions and their protection of tenure, we can't get rid of all those old, lazy, burnt-out teachers when we gut educational budgets and lay off even more teachers.  No, all of those young, bright and conveniently cheap teachers are laid off to protect a bunch of grizzled incompetents.  Wait, the states with strong teacher's unions tend to have better educational outcomes than those in the "Right to Work" states with little or no job protections?  Oh, and those countries that we're always wringing our hands over how they're eating our educational lunch on international benchmarks, like Finland, have strong unions as well?  Well, uh, ahem…teachers unions are ruining our schools, or something!

So I confess. I'm one of those lazy, overpaid, nation-bankrupting, leftist-indoctrinating, union thugs who is plotting the downfall of America from inside my "government" school.  It feels good to get that off my chest.  Never fear, though, their are some noble heroes of virtue and benevolence who are valiantly fighting to rescue education from mine and my fellow public school teachers' insidious control.  Altruistic types like elite Ivy League-educated hedge fund managers.  Billionaire "philanthropists" like Bill Gates and Eli Broad.  The Main Street, U.S.A. destroying Walton family.  You know, the same people who,  always "Stand for Children," put "Students First," and have historically always been on the side of the little man, the downtrodden, and the underdog; unlike those greedy, self-interested teachers who are in the classroom day in and day out, buying supplies out of their own pockets and occasionally taking a bullet for their students.

Feel better?