A Salute to Teachers
Actor Matt Damon made waves recently at a Save Our Schools rally when he said, “A teacher wants to teach. Why else would you take a sh*tty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?” He was responding to a question about whether job security for teachers made them lazy.
Teaching is a much maligned profession in the United States these days. There is a tendency to dismiss teachers as union lackeys who, once they get tenure, are just marking time before they retire with handsome benefits.
Two myths about teachers contribute greatly to this opinion. The first is that teachers get paid for 12 months despite working for only 10. This myth finds currency especially in bad economic times but can be easily refuted by the simple explanation that the annual salary is just divided into monthly installments.
The second myth, a more pernicious one, is that teaching is a cushy occupation with a shortened workday and terrific holidays. Anyone who has ever personally known a teacher will tell you that this is a ridiculous assertion. My mother taught for several years across different schools, and my lasting memory is of her hunched over her table late into the night, correcting notebooks, grading exam papers, and preparing report cards. Over the summer, teachers in the United States attend training sessions and symposia designed to keep them up to date with developments in education. The American teacher often spends her own money to decorate the classroom and fill it with supplies.
The same unions we deride today for their inflexibility and defense of tenure made teaching a possible career for people who genuinely love kids. Yes, I have come across the rare teacher who is burnt out and still on the job because of pension or retirement calculations.
But my children’s teachers have been, by and large, inspirational, lovable, hard-working, and flexible. They deal with allergies, behavioral problems, special needs, neglectful parents, intrusive parents, and budget cuts on a daily basis and do it with a smile on their face. Even in the India of two decades ago, I had teachers who inspired me, recognized my potential, and urged me to dream big.
As I prepare to send my children back to school next week, I am confident that I am entrusting them to talented educators who only have their best interests at heart. The education system in the United States may not be perfect, and there may be some merit to the clamor to reform teacher hiring and firing practices but, to me, the individual teacher is an unsung hero.
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Thank you, Vidya, for this heartfelt and truthful piece! As an educator, I appreciate your input.
So many people blast teachers unions without an understanding that they -- the NEA, the AFT, and other unions that larger cities might have [i.e., the Chicago Teachers Union] -- are not there to protect bad teachers; they exist for many other reasons that benefit education workers and, ultimately, the students themselves. And people, for some reason, feel comfortable complaining about teachers and their "cushy lifestyle and benefits" when clearly they don't have any understanding of a teacher's nearly 24/7 "lifestyle" or how their benefits work.
Teachers, firefighters, police, and public medical employees are not the drain on state budgets that they have been made out to be. Rather, it is the states' mishandling of, misappropriation of, and robbing from the pension funds that created the problems that so many state governments face today. It is a shame that the worker has to shoulder the burden of correcting other peoples' mistakes.
To any IC reader who is employed as an educator of any kind, I say "be proud of what you do and be joyful in how your work affects generations of children, our future."
Appreciate the kind comments, Jeanne. Having known many teachers personally, I get infuriated when the entire profession is maligned the way it is today. There are good teachers, bad teachers, and great teachers. Nearly all come into the profession because they like children and see it as a calling, something that cannot be said for most other jobs. Yes, some get ground down and burnt out by the challenges and some get lazy. And there is ample scope for reform of our educational system, in our vision of what we should be teaching our kids, in the way we measure performance and results. But the expectations that are put on any individual teacher are just unbelievably unrealistic. I've had teachers who have had to deal with parents who have left their children alone after school because they could not leave their jobs and could not afford day care. I've known teachers who received hate mail when kids did not get the right grade. It is a high pressure, high stress job that often goes unrecognized.
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