I preface this by saying I am the daughter of a teacher, and stepdaughter of another. I am the next door neighbor to three teachers. I am the friend to many teachers. I have 5 children in the public school system.
Over the last several weeks, I have read the internet posts, the Facebook comments, the political diatribes and nonsense being spewed on Fox News, and very few stories have hit me quite like this one.
It is true that my mother got holidays and summers off. However, to supplement her very low income, she often taught summer school, volunteered to head extra curriculars, and mentored her graduated students well after their tassles had been turned. We did not live a particularly lavish lifestyle, but it was one filled with the same gifts she shared with her students. We visited museums, trekked through the woods to find and sample fiddleheads, and when an opportunity to educate us arose, she took it. Years later, I would take notice of how many of her students still chose to know her. She touched their lives with simple encouragement, and giving them generous allotments of her time. There was never a punching of a clock, when one day ended or began. It was like motherhood, a seamless blending of one day into the next, peppered with phone calls, and heart wrenching tasks. She attended student funerals, and art exhibits, weddings, and baby showers. She would sometimes be up past my bedtime, with the low murmuring of the TV in the background as she graded paper after paper, writing words of enthusiasm or constructive criticism. She became president of the union, and would often be on phone calls for hours while cooking our dinner, the phone tucked in the crook of her neck and shoulder, while she used the spatula to flip the food. There were notes scrawled throughout the house about upcoming meetings, calls to return, and thoughts she had for the next meeting. There were grievances to file, contracts to renew, budgets to amend. She made far less than other people with her experience who worked 9-5 for the state, or private corporations. But it wasnt about her paycheck. Or the crystal apple awards she won, or even being written up in the Who's Who of American Teachers. It was about the pride she could feel when one student became an FBI agent, and another a doctor attempting to cure cancer, and another an occupational therapist with a happy family.
Lately, the politicians and even citizens of this country have taken to blaming our public school educators for being greedy. They are accused of being "part time employees", who are abusing a bereft financial system. Without taking into consideration the amounts of money these teachers spend for their own classroom supplies, or offering special incentives for their students, most of our teachers are being paid less than $2.00 per hour for each of their students, which is far less than someone like you or I could make babysitting in our home. Our own Dave Herrington spends hundreds of hours of his afterschool time organizing and directing the fifth grade play, even though he hasn't a fifth grader, nor does he even teach fifth grade. Many of our teachers come to our PTA meetings and events, donate their time and money to our fundraisers, and attend the Board of Education meetings once a month. There are workshops in school, when many outsiders think the teachers are relaxing at home with their children on a three day weekend. They spend weeks inputting grades for report cards, and then days meeting with harried parents to discuss their children's progress.
The next time some plaster haired talking head appears on the news to discuss our greedy teachers, perhaps we could pause a moment to think of the teachers we have in our life, and think of their mansions, their Range Rovers, their Dolce and Gabana teacher sweaters worn at Christmas, their opulent parties and entourages. We could think of the trillions of dollars our country has sacrificed in the name of war, and stolen from the next generations of students and schools. And possibly think that without these same teachers, the moms who update their Facebook statuses with constant frustration over their children being in their hair, and driving them crazy, would be spending THEIR time homeschooling their kids for the next thirteen years, and magically, our perspectives may be put back in order.
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