Less Is More, Or The Big Paycheck

Jejak PandaHallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Website Ini
judi bandarqI wrote a nostalgic piece last week, but I can’t do that two weeks in a row. Today, I have to comment on a conversation I had with a dishwasher repairman.

My dishwasher may be dying. It still washes the dishes and it isn’t spraying water across the kitchen floor (it did that once before and I had to change a filter), but it has been making this god-awful high-pitched screeching sound, which is why I have been doing dishes by hand all week. The repair guy was scheduled to come today, but like the cable guy, he gave me a four hour window of time during which he might come, and then he called with about twenty minutes left in that window to say he’d be arriving in thirty minutes, and then he arrived fifty-five minutes later—not that I’m bitter, as my colleague Gina would say.

OK, so Tim was a nice guy as appliance repairmen go, and while he tinkered around with my dishwasher he struck up conversation, and he asked me if I had to take the day off today to be there to meet him, and I said, “Sort of.” Now, I like the fact that my job allows me to be able to take a day like today for things like meeting a repairman coming to my house, but I hate being asked about it because I know what’s coming. It’s like when people ask teachers what they do and as soon as you say, “I’m a teacher,” they make some comment about all your time off and how nice and easy it must be to get out of work so early each day—yadda, yadda. You all know the conversation. Fact of the matter is, I rarely take days, and I only take days when I have things like repairmen who give me four hour windows of time and then arrive an hour late, or doctor’s appointments, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I’m a workaholic. I check my email in hotel lobbies on vacation. Heck, I’m writing this at 11 PM. So I know what he must be thinking, and I don’t want to get into it because I fear that I’ll sound like Hamlet’s mother, protesting too much. But then he surprises me by saying his mother was a first grade teacher, and I’m thinking, “All right. I can probably talk about education with this guy without the misperceptions and the innuendos.” But then he says, “Hey, can I ask you about something? What do you think of the dedication of teachers today? Is it the same as it was years ago?”

Well, I don’t know how to answer this question. I’m not THAT old, and I haven’t been teaching even twenty years quite yet (18 or 19 if you go back to student teaching), so I say something along the lines of how teacher preparation is much more rigorous than it once was, and the standards are higher, and the required content knowledge is greater. But he says, “No, I mean dedication to the field. Are they willing to do the things teachers used to do?” So I must be looking at him with a funny look, you know, my head tilted sideways like a dog does or something, and he proceeds to clarify that it was his opinion, gleaned from his mother, that teachers were more dedicated back in the day, and that these days they’re just in it for the paycheck. OK, now I don’t know where to begin responding. So I say, “Are you suggesting that in the good old days teachers worked harder because they were paid less?” And I’m thinking, Would you have gotten here about three hours earlier than you did if I paid you less? But I bite my tongue. He clarifies by saying no, not exactly, but that he thinks that when the pay was low only the truly dedicated went into the profession, and these days too many teachers just want the big paycheck. That’s what he said. The BIG PAYCHECK. He then proceeded to tell me a second-hand story about some student-teacher his mother had years ago who refused to do all sorts of unspecified things she was asked to do and how she just wanted the short hours, the vacation time, the pay. Et cetera.

Once again, I don’t know where to begin with this guy. For one, if the paycheck was so great and all, why do we have shortage areas in just about every area? At the secondary level, I believe Social Studies is the only non-shortage area. Two, why do so many teachers I know have second jobs tending bar, waiting tables, running a Christmas tree farm, or selling perfume in a department store? Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re paid well and that tenure, even though it is intended to ensure our professional rights, also functions to give us a great degree of job security. But most of the teachers I know work their asses off and usually spend their vacations (and weekends and evenings) grading and planning. If we got paid a decent hourly wage we’d make significantly more than our salaries. I’m sure everyone knows the old joke about getting five dollars an hour for babysitting your students. If you had 100 students and saw each one for an hour a day you’d gross $90,000 at the end of a 180 day school year. How many of you make that?

The New York Times ran an editorial today by Timothy Egan titled “Lesson Plans, 2009.” It’s a cynical piece that the Times staff chose to highlight with a box that says “It’s back to school with bad teachers, bored students, and baffling parents.” In it, teachers are accused of being overpaid, selfish, incompetent, insubordinate, lazy, and—to beat all—drunk. Nice. I finished reading the column and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if they paid us all less …”