Truth Tuesday
You may or may not have noticed that there’s trouble afoot in Wisconsin lately. With my busy schedule of going to work, learning how to speak fluent 2-year-old, and sleeping, it’s a wonder I notice anything that’s going on in the world anymore. But the protests in Wisconsin over the governor’s attempts to annihilate labor unions have got my attention. Not only because it’s sad to see working people tearing each other down for false notions of who is getting a free ride from whom, but also because it’s the latest battleground in an ongoing war on teachers.
I admit that I feel powerless. I don’t know how to fix education in this country, but I’m fairly certain, as many people in Wisconsin seem to be, that the solution doesn’t involve demonizing teachers. People don’t become teachers because they want to live high on the hog—they do it because they want to teach.
I know this partly because I went to private school—wait, don’t roll your eyes yet. I have a point here.
Compared to a grueling job in public education, teaching private school must be like nirvana, even if there’s no pension plan per se. My teachers were paid a decent salary, encouraged to be autonomous, and genuinely seemed to love their jobs—and still, when an invited speaker addressed our high school student body and asked “who here wants to be a teacher?” no hands were raised. We were all supposed to end up as doctors and lawyers and other prestigious folk. Even the most awesome teaching job in the world was perceived as not good enough.
I think this gets to the heart of the problem. On one hand, we hold our kids’ teachers to high standards, expecting them to drill our little academic soldiers relentlessly until their test scores approach perfection while also (somehow) instilling in them a love of learning. After all, we pin so many hopes and dreams on our kids’ ability to perform well in school and their desire to keep learning, striving, and achieving. But on the other hand, we don’t value teaching as a profession. Those hopes and dreams don’t involve our kids growing up to teach middle school.
Well, thank god that some of our kids do disappoint us by choosing, as a lifelong pursuit, to share their love of learning with those who came after them. Shouldn’t we be trying to make their jobs easier, better, and more fulfilling instead of less?
Photo by msr on Flickr.
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