Rant on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I never thought I would see the day when people honestly complained about teachers’ salaries.\u00a0 But it’s happened.\u00a0 Thanks to the hullabaloo in Wisconsin, pundits–mostly Republicans, as near as I can tell–are complaining about how much teachers make.\u00a0 And besides, they only work nine months a year, right?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These two complaints are, quite frankly, bullshit.\u00a0 I personally don’t think we pay teachers enough.\u00a0 They have one of the worst jobs possible.\u00a0 It’s their responsibility to educate kids, which in and of itself is a challenge.\u00a0 Very few children want<\/em> to go to school and learn things.\u00a0 Even when we get older, most people don’t have an interest in furthering their education.\u00a0 They may be motivated to do so by a desire for better employment, but actually going to school is not something many people desire.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So a teacher’s primary duty is to deliver a service to an audience who doesn’t want it.\u00a0 Their secondary duty is to keep their classes under control.\u00a0 Now, I have done a little teaching at my church, with maybe eight to ten kids in my class.\u00a0 I had an assistant or was an assistant each time.\u00a0 Let me tell you, it’s not easy keeping those kids from being unruly and disruptive for thirty minutes or so.\u00a0 But it is teacher’s responsibility to do just that for many hours every day, five days a week, for roughly nine months out of the year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Since I brought it up, let’s address that time issue for a moment.\u00a0 In high school, many of the teachers I got to know a little took summer jobs.\u00a0 That aside, think about working a job where for nine months you cannot take a break!<\/em> You can take a day off if you get sick, but other than that you are expected to show up for work every day.\u00a0 No personal time off, no vacations.\u00a0 Many teachers do extracurricular activities, supervising one school club or another–yes, voluntarily riding herd on a classroom full of kids again–and so might end up working on weekends.\u00a0 Teachers are typically salaried, so there’s no overtime in that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In modern times, being a teacher is extra difficult.\u00a0 One has to exert extra control over oneself.\u00a0 Most of the offices I have worked in have had official policies which basically say off-color jokes and bad language are a no-no, but much of the office banter is nonetheless politically incorrect.\u00a0 F-bombs are let loose pretty easily.\u00a0 But in a classroom?\u00a0 No can do.\u00a0 That’s a quick suspension or a termination if it happens often enough.\u00a0 You have to make extra sure you keep in line, particularly at school but sometimes in your private life as well.\u00a0 If somebody in my office let a sex video get online and the rest of us found out about it, it would be an embarrassment (maybe!) for whoever did it, but meaningless to their job.\u00a0 If the same thing happened to a teacher, their entire career could be over!<\/em> Hell, there’s been a couple of cases I have read about where a teacher posted on Facebook about going to a bar and getting a little drunk or used bad language in a Facebook or Twitter post and got fired.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On top of that, there’s the concern of child abuse.\u00a0 Not so much engaging in it, but being accused of it.\u00a0 You have twenty or thirty kids in your care and you have to make absolutely one-hundred percent certain that none of your actions can be construed as a sexual advance or otherwise abusive.\u00a0 Think about where you work, and imagine going through every single day without saying something negative about one of your co-workers or something suggestive.\u00a0 The latter might be easy enough at the lower grade levels, but high school boys and girls are becoming young men and women and, well, jail bait is called jail bait for a reason.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But teachers get through this and avoid such accusations every single day of the school year.\u00a0 When they don’t, it often makes national news.\u00a0 Even the smallest accusation can be a career-ender, even if it’s not true.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So are teachers overpaid?\u00a0 Hardly.\u00a0 They deserve far more than they get paid.\u00a0 On top of everything I have already listed, they have the single most important job in the country.\u00a0 More important than doctors and policemen and politicians.\u00a0 They educate our youth, empowering them to become<\/em> doctors and policemen and politicians.\u00a0 Oh, and to become teachers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rant off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rant on. I never thought I would see the day when people honestly complained about teachers’ salaries.\u00a0 But it’s happened.\u00a0 Thanks to the hullabaloo in Wisconsin, pundits–mostly Republicans, as near as I can tell–are complaining about how much teachers make.\u00a0 And besides, they only work nine months a year, right? These two complaints […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":394,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}