In defense of teachers
TRAVERSE CITY — If I were a college student in America today, I would never consider becoming a public school teacher. Those who do deserve everlasting respect, as well as huge salaries and perhaps a bouquet of flowers, and a thank you note delivered to class every Friday for making it through another week without tearing out their hair or quitting in a huff.
I mean, seriously, could we treat them any worse?
We talk about how important they are then — just as we do with first responders and military — we pay them like crap and then say they’re paid too much.
We blame them for the U.S. “falling behind” the rest of the world, as if it’s their fault.
We expect them to work 10-14 hour days when you add in the regular school day, grading homework, before and after work meetings, after school activities, incessant paperwork and emails with parents.
We blame all of society’s ills on them, as if they’re the ones who raised our kids. As if they’re the ones who didn’t read to them when they were young. As if they’re the ones who send them to school hungry, sick, tired or unmotivated. As if they’re responsible for letting our kids be raised on Nintendo, Xbox and PS4 instead of Hemingway, Thoreau and Twain.
We gripe bitterly about them getting “summers off,” when in fact most teachers aren’t sitting around in July and August eating bonbons and sipping sherry. They’re more often working a summer job to help make ends meet or studying to pass certification tests.
We require them to spend their days teaching to standardized tests instead of adapting their teaching techniques to the students at hand. (Educational bureaucrats, of course, know best.)
We treat them like political footballs and demonize their unions. The GOP, in particular, does this under the guise of “caring about kids,” but the truth is their longstanding goal is to kill off unions because union members often vote for Democrats.
We gripe about their benefits, and yet have you ever once heard someone outside of teaching gripe about the benefits they get at their jobs? Hypocritical much?
We pay the bare minimum for education, to the point that most teachers have to buy their own classroom supplies, and we know this, but we do nothing about it. Of course we don’t reimburse them. How’d you like to buy your own work tools?
Then there’s all the recent nonsense. Did you catch Michigan’s own Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Secretary of Education, on “60 Minutes” last week? If her vapid, clueless, disinterested, uncaring comments didn’t make you weep for the fate of the nation’s public school children, nothing will. She’s there to kill public education, not save it.
Then there’s the final straw: guns. Only in America would we confront the problem of madmen slaughtering our children in the public schools by doing nothing about the guns that are most often used in those slaughters. Instead we say, “Arm teachers!” as if that’ll solve the problem.
Yes, maybe a few will want to take on the task of being both teacher and SWAT team leader for their school. But I’ll bet the majority think, “Uh, that’s not what I got into teaching for.”
But who cares what they think. They’re just teachers.
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Andrew Heller, an award-winning newspaper columnist, appears weekly in the Daily Press. He graduated from Escanaba Area High School in 1979. Follow him at andrewheller.com and on Facebook and Twitter. Write to him via email at andrewhellercolumn@gmail.com.