What Teachers Make

This latest email going around got me thinking about my career:
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The dinner guests were sitting around the table discussing life. One man, a CEO, decided to explain the problem with education. He argued, “What’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”

He reminded the other dinner guests what they say about teachers: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” To stress his point he said to another guest, “You’re a teacher, Susan, be honest, what do you make?”

Susan, who had a reputation for honesty and frankness replied,

You want to know what I make?
I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I make a C+ feel like the Congressional Medal of Honor.
I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence.

You want to know what I make?
I make kids wonder.
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write.
I make them read, read, read.

I make them show all their work in math and perfect their final drafts in English. I make them understand that if you have the brains, and you follow your heart, and if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make, you must pay no attention because they just failed to learn.

Susan paused, and then continued. “You want to know what I make? I make a difference. What do you make?”

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I often catch myself leaning toward the CEO’s opinion. I think that perhaps I’d be better off doing something less satisfying in order to be able to put more money into my kids’ college fund. But then my kids remind me why this isn’t so important. They tell me they want to be teachers when they grow up. I have mixed feelings about that.

That thought never occurred to me when I was their age. Teaching wasn’t a profession, it was just something weird people - who, to me, didn’t even exist outside those weird buildings - did. No normal person would want to do that. You didn’t make any money. You worked harder and longer than most other professions, and the most common customer reaction was ridicule and disrespect.

Yeah, I know what many of you are thinking at this point, “teachers? work longer and harder? They only work 9 months out of the year and most schools only schedule 6-hour days.” That’s about as ridiculous as believing that actors in a play only work during the actual performance of the play or that professional athletes only work during the game or that private business owners only work Monday through Friday from 9-5. Think about it. Does anyone in the real world only work those hours anymore? Plenty of people in the business world do... certainly not the owners or managers, but plenty do. No full-time teachers have hours that easy or regular.

I had fallen so hard for the myths about teaching as a profession that the thought didn’t even cross my mind when I ended up changing my major from business to liberal arts. I was so disappointed with the rigid path laid out in the business program and its lack of opportunity for discovery and exploration that I switched after my first year. Even when I declared English as a major - because it allowed for the study of everything - it didn’t occur to me to become a teacher. Oddly enough, it was my friends’ constant question of: “what will you do with an English degree, teach?” that even got me thinking about it. I didn’t really want to teach, but I couldn’t ignore three straight years of that question without it having some kind of effect.

One summer, while doing construction work for a guy who started the company after retiring as a detective, some of my college-aged co-workers asked the question again. The company owner butted in and said, “Why would he have to teach? What CAN’T you do with an English degree?” Everyone turned to look at him, even me, like he had just spoken Martian. Realizing he now had an audience, something he thoroughly enjoyed, he continued, “I’d rather hire someone with a good solid education like that. Someone who can think for himself, than some smart-ass fresh out of a carpentry program that thinks he knows everything.” He still wasn’t making much sense to us, but he went on, “And what if he did teach? What’s wrong with that? The fact that you bums even got into college is because of your teachers. I don’t care what job you think is better for whatever reason. You wouldn’t do it, there would be no role models in that career field, if there weren’t good teachers out there preparing those people and making them believe they could succeed. Things don’t always work out like you plan, but whatever success you manage to have, you owe to a teacher.” We were used to being shocked by Dave’s outbursts of wisdom, but we didn’t call it wisdom at the time.

I still wasn’t going to be a teacher. I was going to do something better than that. This guy was nuts. He’d apparently seen too much in Vietnam, then later as a career cop and detective on the Akron Police Department. Only a fool would choose a thankless, underpaid, often dangerous life as a public servant. What did he know about life? He had to start a business in his retirement just to get by thanks to his public service career.

So I finished up my English degree, and thanks to that constant question, picked up a teaching certificate as a sort of hedge or backup plan, or even an afterthought. Right out of college I started working for another construction company. I’d done it for five summers by that point, and my experience in the National Guard, in a civil engineering unit, had provided even more experience in that field, so it was easy enough to slip into. There was plenty of work. It paid pretty good, and I enjoyed the variety of settings and most of the people. I also enjoyed seeing the immediate results of my efforts. Only later did the need for immediate gratification in the form of one’s chosen profession strike me as immature.

At that point, the questions changed from, “what are you gonna do, teach?” to “why would someone with a college degree ever want to do construction work?” Even my colleagues in the National Guard joined in, constantly asking, “since you have your degree, when are you going to become an officer?” I began to realize how much of the world saw the sole purpose of education as furthering one’s career. To more people than I would ever have guessed, a college degree meant no more than a bigger paycheck. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone that a mechanic or a construction worker or anyone might be better at his job, or be a better employee, even a better citizen or member of society by seeking understanding not only of his job, but of the world around him. Where had education gone wrong? When did it become nothing more than a commodity to be traded for a paycheck?

I took it all in and eventually sought out a career that seemed more publicly in line with my education. A small-town weekly newspaper was looking for a “stringer.” I didn’t even know what that was, but the ad said it involved writing. I found out it was a “get paid as you go” system of writing stories for the paper. No sooner had I started getting $10 per council meeting story and making my face known in the newspaper’s office, did I discover they also needed a handyman. I weaseled my way into a full-time position there as a writer and office furniture builder/arranger/trash taker outer. I was making quite a bit less money than I did in construction, but had to answer fewer questions about my English degree. I started taking and developing pictures for the paper to go along with my stories, and mostly by attrition, ended up as the editor of that little paper. It was one of the most fun but lowest paying jobs I’d ever had. No bosses, no real hours, just a weekly deadline, a critical public and a seasoned publisher to please. It was as close to running my own business as I ever wanted to be. It was a blast. But as I thought about buying a house and having kids, and the publisher decided that cutting the cost of the paper to less than half of what it was when I’d started wasn’t enough, I took a full-time position in my Air National Guard unit. All of a sudden, I would have actual benefits, be able to leave town without missing something, and regular hours. The pay was almost double and it was a management position so it would be a better resume builder than I’d ever had. It wasn’t anything I’d ever dreamed of doing, but I decided I’d give it five years and see what happened. After four, I knew that management, especially with the government, wasn’t something I could do for the rest of my life.

Oddly enough, it was the recruiter in my guard unit who continued my education on education by asking me if I’d ever thought about teaching. While employed by the Guard, we’d manned the recruiter’s booth at a county fair and both thoroughly enjoyed talking to high school students about the guard, the Air Force, our unit and the careers available. As we were packing up, this recruiter talked about the classes I’d taught to adults in our guard unit as part of my job there. “Man you’re good at that.” he said, “Your enthusiasm is contagious - people don’t even sleep when YOU teach those classes.” He pointed out how at ease I’d been while speaking with the high school students at the fair. He suggested that it looked like I was enjoying myself, and he was right. I was. But I wasn’t making the connection. On the way back to our station, I told him that I had, in fact, picked up a teaching certificate while in college, but never really thought of it as a career. According to him, it was clear: I’d been given a gift. I’d been steered in this direction and it was obvious what I should do with it. He asked me why I never tried teaching.

It had been a good ten years since I’d thought about that question. On the way home that night, I couldn’t remember the answer. As it happened, that very summer was the year the state of Ohio decided to revamp their teacher licensing program. I got a letter in the mail telling me that my teaching certificate, which had expired, would no longer be renewable after that summer. I was still in the mindset of maintaining that certificate as a backup plan when I called Columbus and asked what I had to do in order to renew. The series of events led me to think more and more about why I had never seriously considered teaching. I told my wife about all of this and she echoed the question adding, “you’d be good at it.”

I made the move. I began substituting while burning up all the vacation time I’d amassed in four years working full-time for the guard. I was at a level where I got six weeks of vacation per year - kind of like teachers, eh?! It didn’t take long to realize that you could work every school day of the year as a substitute if you wanted to and IF you could take it. (That would be the only situation where a “teacher” only worked 9 months out of the year) It was during this transition that I learned first hand that teaching IS doing. Not only must you master your subject matter and present it effectively, but you must also master a wide variety of management skills most professions never call upon. Then you must deliver this whole package every period of every day you’re in a classroom, much like a boxer must give his all every time the bell starts a round. In every other profession I’d had, you could get by with bad days. “Phoning it in” never really set you back much most of the time, but teachers don’t get that opportunity during those 9 months of 6-hour days. When the bell rings, it’s on. You either perform, or you get eaten alive. I knew then that I at least had to see if I could face this challenge even if I was never actually going to stoop so low as to become a teacher for a living.

I continued to be employed by the guard until I used up all my leave. By that point I’d taken on work teaching night classes to adults at the local vocational school. On alternate nights, I taught students who had been kicked out of regular high school at the big high school in a neighboring town, and I occasionally taught Saturday seminars to local businesses or organizations through that vocational program. I was still working most days as a substitute and eventually landed a long-term sub position at the high school where I began teaching English for good. Those days when I went back to my Guard unit to serve the traditional weekend duty, I received more support for my new career than I expected, but never without the occasional reminder of what society really thinks about teachers. Someone always said, “...finally realized you couldn’t DO, so now you teach, eh?” By then, of course, I knew that if I were to swap jobs with anyone dumb enough to actually believe that, I’d probably get by just fine in their spot while they wouldn’t last 10 minutes in my classroom.

I’ve now been teaching full-time for eight years. I began in a large urban high school and now teach in one of the smallest rural schools in Ohio. Both have their advantages. Both have their disadvantages, just like any other job. A number of ideas come to mind now that I’ve settled in and in light of the email that inspired this rambling. While I suppose that deep down somewhere, I still believe teaching is, in fact, a noble profession, for those of us who do it every day, it’s just a job, like any other. It is that buried belief that gets us past the criticism of immature students and adults; that helps us find a way to survive in spite of the low pay; that drives us to get better when most of the public notices only our failures. But really, it’s just the job we do. We know why we do it and what we do and what we make. We know that critical thinking will never be accurately measured on any standardized test, that the vision and imagination to solve the world’s future problems will never be part of the mandated curriculum and that we will always be more accountable to ourselves and our students than any government program could ever hold us. Those of us who stay in this profession also know that the gratification doesn’t come at the end of the day, week or year, but in seeing students grow up, move on, and do what they want to do with their lives. It takes a while for that to happen. In order to DO this job, you have to be smart, quick, tolerant, wise and all that other easy stuff required in any profession, but mostly, you have to be patient and mature. Few can DO that like teachers.

I could kick myself these days for the ten years I wasted toying with “real” professions, but the truth is, I wasn’t mature enough to know any of this during those years. I didn’t have the experience or the wisdom that classroom teachers have to have to survive, let alone be effective teachers. I don’t know how people straight out of college do it, but I work with many of them and continue to be amazed. They have something that a society who doesn’t value it could never understand, and thus has never been willing to pay for. That’s our fault for being more concerned with providing a quality product than with marketing it.

Sadly, the trend of society looking down upon teachers is more firmly in place now than it has ever been. Society has never put its money where its mouth was. Sure education is important, we claim, but we’re not willing to actually pay for it. We’ve gotten away with that because so many young women were willing to do it for token salaries for so long. And we got away with that by convincing ourselves that anybody could do what these young women did. It was JUST teaching. We respected the dedication of these young women, but we would never admit they were professionals who were good at what they did. Or rather, that what they did might actually be a profession.

These days, not only has pay remained a salient truth that society doesn’t believe teaching is a skilled profession, but the level of respect has dropped to join the pay, as the email points out. Another example of this loss of status, another sign that the trend is continuing comes in the form of the benefit of the doubt teachers always give and used to get. When I got a detention or an F on a paper, I got punished at home, on the spot. AFTER the lecture and the punishment, I was sometimes given the opportunity to explain my side of the story - not that it ever counted for much. The assumption was that the teacher was right, had already given the student the benefit of the doubt, and finally had to resort to the F or the detention, or the letter home. But these days, thanks, probably, to the public assertion that we need No Child Left Behind or standardized tests or school district report cards to be accountable, the assumption is that the teacher just has it in for that student. The one stereotype of teachers that used make up for the rest of the abuse - integrity, dedication, respect - is now questioned as well.

Teacher pay has in fact increased quite a bit since those days when only women taught, but I still took a huge pay cut even from government work when I started teaching. Now that we also seem to be losing the authority we once had as impartial judges of appropriate classroom behavior or assessors of student work in our subject area, what else do we still have to lose? How clear does society have to make it that they believe our jobs could be done by machines or monkeys?

To that I say simply, try it. The only thing I have to lose is a career that challenges me and in meeting that challenge, is satisfying. When the monkeys or machines replace me, I’ll get a real job and make some real money for a change. When I go back to making widgets rather than making a difference, at least my integrity and skills will no longer be questioned.