It's strange. I sort of feel that, as a public school teacher, I'm under attack. With the current assault on unions, with the national budget crisis, with constant talk about the deficit, it feels like a lot of politicians and much of the public is coming after us. Supposedly we are fat cats, we've got bloated pensions and salaries, we're the excess and the drain on the economy.
Funny, I've been a public teacher for 17 years and I don't have enough money to buy a home or condo. Because I moved from Illinois to Massachusetts, I'm not contributing one dollar to any kind of pension this year. I have a very modest retirement ready for me when I turn 62. Many of my friends my age are earning six figures by now, and I'm far from from it.
The average teacher salary is so low that it prices us out of home ownership in THIRTY TWO metropolitan areas. The average Korean teaching salary is 250% more than an American's.
There's more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
I know lots of people think teachers are lazy, abuse tenure, and are a leech on the public system. All I can tell you is that most teachers I know work hard, care deeply, and have given up a LOT to stay in the profession. In this profession you regularly hear about some teacher that decided to leave field to get into textbook publishing (or some sort of bullshit consulting, etc.), and the story always ends the same: now they make 4 times the salary. Such a move is always available, and teacher after teacher never takes it. They just keep teaching with in an undervalued profession with low pay and (for some reason) the increasing ire of a nation.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
One Day We Will Be Retired and These Students Will Be Running the World
The following is the last line in an essay written by a high school junior:
"It was, clear, that, in writing 'On the Laps of Gods,', author Robert Whittaker did his research, so to speak."
Read that over a few times. Let it sink in. Say it out loud. Say it to a friend.
It's author isn't one of my students (thank God), but I am still haunted by this sentence. Where to begin? Should we talk about the enthusiastic use of commas? What it means to close an essay by mentioning the author did his research? Or to end with "so to speak," as in "I just said he did his research but I am now casting doubt upon that fact, which means my astonishingly banal comment about what any author does by definition has just been undermined for some undetermined reason"?
So yes, this quote is from an American student. Yes, this is the state of affairs. And this is an honor's student, so ostensibly it gets worse from there.
But not all hope is lost. A few weeks ago I had my class read "Politics of the English Language" by Orwell, and we discussed the crimes regularly committed against good rhetoric. When I asked the students to be aware of the state of our discourse, Conor, one of my best students, brought this sentence (so to speak) to my attention.
Conor is to academics what a five tool-player is to baseball. For the those who don't know, a five-tool player is the rare baseballer who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, speed on the base paths, throwing, and fielding. Conor is the once-every-10-years kind of student who works hard, is extraordinarily intelligent, creative, hilarious, and empathetic. If Conor is running the world when we're all retired, we'll be in much better shape than we are now.
"It was, clear, that, in writing 'On the Laps of Gods,', author Robert Whittaker did his research, so to speak."
Read that over a few times. Let it sink in. Say it out loud. Say it to a friend.
It's author isn't one of my students (thank God), but I am still haunted by this sentence. Where to begin? Should we talk about the enthusiastic use of commas? What it means to close an essay by mentioning the author did his research? Or to end with "so to speak," as in "I just said he did his research but I am now casting doubt upon that fact, which means my astonishingly banal comment about what any author does by definition has just been undermined for some undetermined reason"?
So yes, this quote is from an American student. Yes, this is the state of affairs. And this is an honor's student, so ostensibly it gets worse from there.
But not all hope is lost. A few weeks ago I had my class read "Politics of the English Language" by Orwell, and we discussed the crimes regularly committed against good rhetoric. When I asked the students to be aware of the state of our discourse, Conor, one of my best students, brought this sentence (so to speak) to my attention.
Conor is to academics what a five tool-player is to baseball. For the those who don't know, a five-tool player is the rare baseballer who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, speed on the base paths, throwing, and fielding. Conor is the once-every-10-years kind of student who works hard, is extraordinarily intelligent, creative, hilarious, and empathetic. If Conor is running the world when we're all retired, we'll be in much better shape than we are now.
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