Snow fell off and on a couple of weeks ago. On the coast we understand a few feet of rain better than a few inches of snow. On a Monday, school was closed.
read “Become a Teacher.”
This happened in 2011 too, but back then it was on a Thursday. I had stayed till 7pm the night before, watching the roads on the internet to ensure the snow didn’t start sticking before I got home. On Wednesday evenings I sat in the school Library (with a math teacher for a few months when we were both paid—I did it for 20 years without pay) to keep the workspace open for kids who needed help, were retaking tests, or who needed computer access. When I packed up for home I lugged the tests I needed to score home but left an eight-inch stack of essays in my room. I would get to them the following weekend and adjust the due date for the other essay that students were supposed to hand in the next day.
The 24th of February 2011 was a snow day, and I was loving it. I had a lot of work to get done but I was taking the day off. This is what I wrote because I could:
I love my job. I say that all the time and it’s true. I’m good at it and I still have a measure of autonomy in my classroom. I can be creative and innovative and my administration actually appreciates me for doing it (I think). I’ve gone gray in this profession. I love my job. I’m proud of the work I do.
Many of my former students have become teachers or are thinking of becoming teachers. And I love them for that too, but it also makes me want to cry, because teachers are not in the same position they were when I was young, or even when I entered the profession.
Ten reasons you don’t want to become a teacher:
- The pay is less than you think. I read on Facebook that if you want “abundant wealth” you should choose the private sector.
- There is no longer job security. My school lost ten teachers last year.
- Your pension isn’t safe—it looks like a pile of money to the public, waiting to be looted.
- Parents don’t trust you.
- The community thinks you have too much time off. They need to hire a sitter for those stupid planning days.
- Even if you teach that kid to read and get him off the streets and are answerable about whether he passes or does not pass all the new tests, you are not heroes like police officers and firefighters—who receive better pay and a sweeter pension package.
- If you have a personal blog, watch your words because freedom of speech doesn’t apply to teachers.
- Summers you will either be working a second job or going to school or both.
- For the same amount of education you could be a nurse with a specialty making twice as much money and no homework on the weekend. You could be a lawyer and work as hard for a lot more money, or a doctor, X-ray technician, plumber, electrician…
The number 10 reason not to become a teacher, the critical reason:
10. Everything is your fault.
- You’re a lousy teacher. If students are unmotivated, tired, hungry, sleepy, sick, absent, homeless, or in jail, you should have motivated them to show up to school every day and complete their homework.
- You make too much money. Compare your income with seven or more years of university education, Masters degree, and twenty years of experience to the wages of the drop-out pumping gas (who you should have motivated to stay in school) and you are paid way too much. You have all that time off and we don’t want to hear any whining about class planning and scoring papers and all that.
- You cause social injustice. If you marry another teacher—surprise! you have an actual middle class income capable of paying for your own children’s college education. But wait! That’s okay for professionals. Everyone understands that if two doctors or lawyers marry they will have a double income. If teachers do that it’s simply unfair. Teachers should be paid less so that if they marry another of their kind they won’t be earning over a hundred thousand dollars between them… after a combined 14 years university education and 30 years of teaching experience. [Seriously, I’ve heard this argument.]
- It’s your union’s fault the economy is a mess. That pension and all those great benefits like health coverage—all that stuff your union got for you—is just too much. You may have paid in, but if we could just take that money we promised you’d get back eventually and spend it on other stuff, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes.
- And another thing, your union and tenure are allowing lousy teachers to ruin kids’ education. If it weren’t for unions and tenure there would be no bad teachers. Look how well that approach has worked for politicians, plumbers, and physicians.
[Trump just wants a profit and his Secretary of Education wants to entirely dismantle our education system and turn it into a money-making scheme.] Obama wanted the same thing Bush wanted, a better education system without having to pay more for it. “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Right? “You get what you pay for” is another cliché. There’s truth in both, but diamonds cost more than glass. A couch from Ethan Allen is going to cost more than one left on the curb, and anyone who thinks they can rely on a junk store couch having the quality of the new custom-built model is deceiving themselves. Try sitting on them. If we want better schools and better teachers, we’re going to have to find a way to make working in schools more attractive. We could start by offering more money and security and respect.
Unions don’t protect bad teachers. Neither does tenure, assuming you have it in your state. (It’s long gone for K12 teachers in the State of Oregon.) I watched two teachers pushed out of the profession while we still had tenure and it wasn’t any harder than it would be to get rid of a factory worker management didn’t want, and it was a heck of a lot easier than getting rid of a bad doctor, and doctors technically don’t have a union. What doctors and lawyers have is the ability to command a professional salary and to move to another hospital or firm that offers them a better deal. Teachers can almost never do that.
Teachers are paid on a set scale that compensates their labor based on years of education and years of experience. However, no school district hires the best qualified teacher—they hire the one they can afford. That means they will start any new teacher at the lowest level they can get away with. Fresh out of college, inexperienced teachers are cheap hires and a cheap hire saves the school district money. Those new teachers last, on average four years, because the work is harder than they expected. A strong and experienced teacher, by contrast, would cost more, even though districts can almost never afford to pay them a wage that would coax them away from a current employer—and isn’t that how it’s done in professions? If a firm wants that better lawyer, they offer him or her more money. (The only education people who negotiate their pay is administrators. When my district insisted it was too broke to offer a raise, not even cost of living raises, administrators still received raises.) A great carpenter with a great reputation commands top dollar.
No one in another district would hire me for what I am paid in my current job. If I left for another district, a school in Portland for example, I would be credited with only 7 years of experience rather than the 24 I have and I would be paid less. They can’t afford to start a teacher on my pay. It’s not in their budget. And if I wanted to move, I couldn’t afford the pay cut. It would take me 8 years to recover my current salary. [Or actually something less than 8 years since my rural school district pays a lot less than Portland.]
What this means is that if school districts wanted to hire the best available teachers, they would have to revamp the way teachers are paid. I’m not talking about paying people for raising their students’ test scores—recent research shows this isn’t effective—it means we’d need some way to offer better teachers (“better” by some standard) higher wages. And, most critically, it would mean schools would have to have the extra money lying around to lure those “better teachers” away from their current employer. They don’t.
I am 66, and I’ve taught since completing 3 undergraduate degrees with honors and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington. I have a masters degree in my field and enough graduate hours for a masters in education too. Until I retired, I worked at least 50-60 hours a week (and all-too-often 70) and throughout the holidays and I STILL had to listen to complaints about my imaginary 3 months off every summer and how tenure protects bad teachers (remember, we have no tenure in Oregon public schools) and how my pension is breaking the state budget (I paid into my pension). I’m supposed to be better qualified, better trained, work harder, and do it all on less salary and with no guarantee that the terms under which I was hired will be honored. Those terms have not been not honored and what I was expecting upon retirement was halved.
…Speaking only for my frugal self, I had no complaints about my salary, but I would have to work full time through my 70s before my retirement income would come close enough to my salary after working in this profession since 1976. I took time out to stay home with my sons, but I had 25 years teaching in my district before a very bad year of stress-induced illness convinced me to retire. Teacher pensions had already been gutted in my state and the public seemed to want more from me for even less respect and autonomy, not to mention less security in my old age.
People who could barely tolerate being in the same room with their own sons and daughters while they were teenagers blame me when I can’t get them to do their homework. It wears me out.
A post on Facebook from a former teacher turned wealthy self-described “Capitalist” explained that if people want “abundant wealth” they will have to leave teaching. He illustrates this with an analogy: “Should trash collectors be paid more than the avg worker? Th…ink about it….Who would you miss more the garbage man, or some Nuclear Physicist?” [I’m not sure if teachers are the trash collectors or the scientists in this scenario.] “Bottom line is– tax payers pay the bill in the public sector… Therefore, it is expected to be a life of service for those who work in our communities…Not a life of abundant wealth…If one is concerned with earning top dollar, then they need to find a job in the ‘private sector,’ where one because of ‘Capitalism’ can earn as much as they desire. So either one should choose to serve the people, or take their talents elsewhere. Teachers work for the public and have to expect a life of service.”
More and more, the person some people seem to want in their schools is not a teacher, but a nun, someone to work purely out of the goodness of their heart. And it’s true that it takes a lot of heart to teach, but that doesn’t excuse blaming teachers for everything the public thinks is wrong with schools. It does not excuse paying teachers second rate wages just because they work in public schools. Second rate earns second rate.
If we are willing to settle for second rate teachers, we’ll have to expect second rate in all public sector jobs. And I do not want second rate air traffic controllers or safety inspectors or police officers or teachers. I don’t think we can expect anyone to work out of the goodness of their heart, as the Facebook poster above seems to expect. When I was a girl I had fantastic teachers… because they were women with limited opportunities and men on the GI bill and the first generation to climb out of hard blue collar jobs.
Today those people find work in other fields that pay better. I think we’re going to have to pay for what we get or we’re going to get what we pay for. That’s true whoever is doing the hiring.
If we want to improve teaching and teachers, it only makes sense that we expect to pay for it.
And it’s likely why excellent public school teachers are in short supply just now.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 
Please allow me to share my story. It’s all true.
I was given five preps my very first year, and was hired six weeks into the school year. Other math teachers whose classes were overcrowded sent their worst students to the “new guy” and with no advance notice of this, my classes were full of insolent, obnoxious, undisciplined miscreants. A veteran next door to me put it this way: With good students, anything works. But with bad students, NOTHING WORKS. She helped me feel better because that’s exactly what I was experiencing. That was it! Nothing was working.
My mentor told me after two months that she too was fed up with the truancy, drug use, lack of discipline and family problems that led to fights, chaos and breakdowns. She was hired to be a math coach and was soon reassigned to teach learners who were just slightly above my level, but not much. She was leaving the profession after 13 years.
Teachers in the “good wing” regularly blamed the rest of us for the major dysfunction. All in all, this was one of the worst years of my life. The dean told me that “others didn’t have these problems.” (LIE). Students would walk out during class and ignore instructions, and after NO PUNISHMENT or just a slap on the wrist like a lunchtime detention they would be right back in class with no apology or consequences. They openly laughed at the rules, threw things, made lewd comments, and many hid their bad behavior behind 504 plans that limited my ability to discipline them. The “no cellphone” rule was a joke. Students refused to turn them or hand them over. They ignored class detentions and endured after school detentions but they would NOT give up their phones. No way. Technology? We rarely used computers because students would immediately go off-topic and seek out ways to goof off online. They used VPNs to end-run banned sites on their phones and the district left it to individual teachers to police the online behavior of 25-30 students at a time. Students were adept at finding inappropriate sites, posts and videos and short of unplugging the computers there was no way to stamp this out completely. Electronic bullying and “tit for tat” dissing was rampant.
In my seventh period class, students would enroll for a few weeks then leave. Four of them were ultimately expelled or forced to drop out because no one could control them. I befriended a retired teacher who came back mid-year when a colleague mysteriously had to leave mid-year. This was very common as faculty looked for any way out. Anyway, she came to the conclusion that the entire assignment was a setup. I was the patsy. Apparently the word got out that I would put up with anything and the next year at a different school was slightly better but not much.
The principal at the second school was a former textbook salesperson who had earned a master’s degree in educational leadership 10 years earlier, and had a whopping two years of teaching experience back in the late 1980s and only two years in administration. She gossiped and used honesty as a tool to punish those she viewed as a threat. Everything was all about sports with her, and when I wrote up a star softball player for insubordination, foul language and bullying another student that sealed my fate. At that school, by the way, assigning a grade of D or F had to be justified with endless documentation and high-pressure meetings where teachers were essentially told to assign at least a “C” no matter what, unless the student’s grade was due to absences, and speaking of absences, most students with up to 21 absences were routinely excused from the automatic failure rule if they simply filled out an appeal form.
Teaching is for suckers. I realize now that society simply uses teachers as the fall guys for social inequality, lack of transportation and opportunity in lower income communities, drug use, domestic violence and general dysfunction. These issues were NOT limited to any one race or ethnic group! In fact, many students of color let me know that if anything, I was known for NOT discriminating. The students appreciated that…but the SYSTEM didn’t. And parents? Good luck with that. I believed all the nonsense about how contacting parents was key to ensuring compliance. HA HAHAHAHA that’s a good one. When I could reach them, which was rare, the usual was response was “That doesn’t surprise me” and in some cases, it was “Hey, he’s your problem during that time.”
I also want to note that I had GREAT, caring students of all backgrounds who privately let me know how much they appreciated my efforts and expressed dismay at the school environment teachers were forced to endure. Most of my best students were either gone by the end of the year or were actively making plans to transfer to other schools or enroll in online, charter or homeschooling options.
There’s so much more to tell. I worked at average schools and have nothing but empathy for those fighting the good fight at similar or worse schools. I also subbed at better schools and can tell you that it was a whole different world. It was fun and fulfilling. They loved my approach and I was regulary called to take assignments before they even were posted. I often wonder what might have happened had I been given an opportunity to teach in a “normal” environment. Most teachers and administrators at those schools have absolutely no idea what is going on in the real world. Ditto for school board members, politicians, the general public, professors of education and education reporters. They’re clueless. It does seem that you get it, though, and I thank you for the opportunity to share. I’m just another talented, educated and caring individual screwed by the system and hounded out of the profession. Multiply me by a million or more and you’ve got an idea of what is happening now as schools go all year with half the faculty being long-term subs and college students avoid the profession. I survived the resulting major depression, but who needs it?
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I taught in an impoverished middle school for a few months, an elite private prep school for a few years, subbed in public schools k12 for eleven, taught in a public high school for twenty-five, and college for eight. I believe you.
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l as a english teacher for seniors some could be challenging but others were some what more willing to learn
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This is the most consistently viewed post I have ever written. That was true when I first put it up years ago on my previous (shuttered) blog. Thousands have read it, generally because they searched for “Why I shouldn’t become a teacher.” There is a follow-up post about why we need people teaching despite all this. I wish people would read that one too.
go here: https://janpriddyoregon.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/why-teach/
The sad thing is what I said at the beginning: I love teaching.
I am fully retired now only because in my last year of teaching college writing for the local high school I was treated as a cog rather than as a respected professional. I still cared about what I was doing and about my students, but changes were made without input and I was informed via email. It was too hard and I was tired. I thought I would teach until I was 72—a lot of people assumed I would never quit. Retiring when I did that last year is probably the major disappointment of my life. But it was the right thing to do, and the only lingering resentment I feel is the way I was blamed.
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From The Washington Post, a comment by Simon Wesley in response to previous comments about why teachers should get back into their classroom or leave the profession:
“Having served as the science department chairman in high schools on both the East and West Coast I have chaired and participated in a lot of teacher search committees over the decades. Back in the ’90’s we would get a stack of 20-30 qualified applicants for any position. By the mid noughties we might get five applications and I sometimes had to ask the superintendent to re-advertise positions to find a qualified candidate. Most new teachers complete four year college programs and half a year of student teaching. (Many of last year’s cohort didn’t get to student teach due to the virus…) They do not just appear out of thin air.
“I have a hard time not laughing when I read comments from ignorant cranks suggesting that teachers who are not happy with in person instruction should just quit and that they will be replaced by teachers under 45. I have significant direct knowledge of the job market in education and can say with extremely high confidence that these replacement teachers simply do not exist. One of the biggest challenges new teachers face is classroom management and it usually takes a couple of years for them to get things under control. Simply learning to teach is tricky enough on its own.
“The idea that a bunch of inexperienced teachers will be able to effectively enforce social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing requirements while maintaining discipline and teaching their content area is comical. Likewise, they will face unprecedented challenges in looking after the social emotional and mental health of their students at the same time.
“Over the past decade I have seen a lot of young teachers leave the profession because they found the demands of the job overwhelming and detrimental to family life and the prospect of ever owning a home. This is one of the reasons why the demographics of teachers skew older. I have no plans to quit regardless, but the fertilizer is really going to hit the ventilator if a lot of my older colleagues do.”
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Thank you for sharing this. I can’t tell you how much of what you experienced was the same thing I underwent. The last line really struck a chord with me because I struggled with PTSD for 1.5 years after leaving after just half a school year.
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I’m 28 and working on my masters in California. Currently, I’m working as an online after school tutoring program. When I was hired in 2020 in September for $13 for a part time job and assigned to a school, I thought no problem. Big problem. I was told that in my unpaid free time I had prep pre-made math lessons and teach/tutor them. Fine, whatever. What’s an extra 5 hours a week for free, it’s for the kids. Two months later, we ran out of pre-made lessons. We were given a couple of math problems from teachers as a guide. My unpaid “lesson prep” time increased. It’s February and our principal now wants copies of our lessons. She wants our hooks, lesson ABC’s, how we are connecting the lesson to previously learned lessons. My solution? Here are the CC standards that I’m working on. I’m not a tutor anymore. They’re trying to turn me into an extra teacher that doesn’t grade. For $14 an hour. Guess who is now hiring for $17 an hour? In &Out. Fast food workers are being paid more than me. Before this job I wanted to be a teacher and I needed to find experience in the classroom. Between researching the past year, this job, and this article, a career in education is just a dumpster fire that’s going to make our country go down in flames.
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ohhga booga i wanna smash
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This article, these comments, have inspired me to not pursue teaching after all. I had some sour experiences substitute teaching last year in addition to being hired for an after school program and being expected to come up with craft ideas for kids on my own time after not having any experience of the sort (I’m experienced with tutoring English). A big heck no from me. What a sad state of affairs.
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They wanted you to create engaging activities and without supplies or support? That is pretty typical. I am sorry about your discouragement. It is easy to understand, but unfortunate. Yes, a sad state of affairs.
I spent 11 years subbing before and after my children were born, K-12, all subjects. It became another sort of education for me, and just now pays extremely well, but I would not go back.
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After 41 years of teaching, I worked for 12 Principals , of which only two were helpful, and kind. Most leadership styles were to intimidate! The teachers who brought goodies, or took on extra duties to make the Principal noteworthy, got bonus pay, or Teacher the Year.
When school tests scores came out, only Administrators received bonuses….
Too many teachers are forced out after 20 years, because they received a poor evaluation, made too much money, and could not get a position in the District. So very sad…. EJ of Florida
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Oh, EJ! Thank you for your comment. In Oregon, as in most of the country, teachers typically leave in the first four years. It’s harder than they thought, pays worse, etc. Bonuses based on evaluations? No one gets a thing here. During 29 years teaching English in Oregon, not a single administrator observed me for more than ten minutes. I had three or four evaluation conferences? I have absolutely no idea what was in my files. But yes, I saw the favoritism you cite. And while the district posted online that the Library was open Wednesday evenings, I did that for over twenty years and was only paid for one year. I was not thanked except by students.
I was there for students.
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This all makes me sad. But not because I wasn’t aware of it. In fact, this is EXACTLY what I’ve been going through. I’m a sub while I finish my degree and teacher certification. My experiences subbing have at times been nightmarish. Overall, I’d say I feel like I’m helping, if only helping teachers most of the time. Several times I’ve considered changing my degree and going back into the private sector but I tell myself not to give up.
I’ve been telling myself that the horrible days are mostly due to my inexperience and lack of training. I meet teachers who are very intelligent and I observe them. It does seem to me that the ones who keep at it have less of a backbone, as my dad would say, than I was raised to have. Adaptable is a nice way to put it. I don’t want to give up but, I ask myself (as if I were a zookeeper), “Do I love working with monkeys enough to keep at it while they throw their feces at me?” I admit that would get old. Is our desire to keep at it for love of monkeys or for our need to feel like we are being of service in the field of science that cares for them? For me, it’s the latter. I’m entering into this realm late in life. I’ve worked as a bartender, executive assistant and even an actress. I’ve had monkeys throw their feces at me in all those jobs. I’ll say this, at least with teaching, you get to feel like maybe you helped a kid a little every now and then. Not so with the other jobs.
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I am so very sorry you are having such an awful time. Teaching is a hard job, done right. A teacher once told me that teaching was the easiest job he’d ever had. If he found the job easy, he was doing it wrong. He didn’t last long.
Teaching is one of the most important things I’ve done in my life. I would not give it up, not even knowing how hard it was. I respected my students. I always focused on the students while I was subbing (I subbed before being hired to teach English.) During the first year I subbed, it was mostly in elementary school and that was the most exhausting! I was even offered a job by a principal I would not have worked with for any amount of money; I told him the truth, I was not certified to teach anything but Art to elementary students. I had strong math skills when I returned to the classroom after my children entered school, I often subbed in math classrooms but was expected to be the replacement of the head of the SS department. I worked on a Social Studies endorsement but was eventually hired to teach English.
My husband only worked a short time in the school and he saved a life, talking down a boy with a knife. Most teachers I respected saved a life now and again. That’s because we care. I was adaptable but demanding, clear about what I wanted and as consistent and fair as I could manage. I tried to make them feel capable and powerful because they shouldn’t feel helpless and victimized. I wrote all my curriculum, eventually developing approaches that addressed a wide range of learning styles. Adults walked over me sometimes, but when I had a problem with a student, I figured as the adult, it was up to me to not take it personally but to figure out a way to work with the student. With two exceptions, I was able to do that. It was exhausting and often frustrating work, but students were never monkeys, not even metaphorical monkeys. I never thought of them that way. Sometimes they were drowning and only needed someone to reach out a hand to pull them to the surface. You already know that.
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I retired after 33 years of teaching history and economics in an affluent and high performing district on Chicago’s North Shore. After I landed, I knew I had landed in the Disney World of teaching. To wit: At the conclusion of my interview with the department chair, he asked what questions I had. Having come from a far less urban environment, I was surprise their was a separate “chair” as head of the department. So, I asked, “What is your role?” His answer: “My teachers need to tell me what they need to be better teachers, and my job is to go get it.” BEST ANSWER EVER FROM ANY ADMINISTRATOR. And, for the next 29 years, despite hiccups, that was the atmosphere in my department (It grew from 13 to 30 teachers.). And, our building and district also worked essentially the same way. They viewed teachers as a valued resource, appreciated input, and when taught issues arose, would put stakeholders around a table to listen, evaluate and find common ground.
But, then our school board hired a very technocratic superintendent. (In Illinois, our pool of superintendents is weak, as state law almost requires that they get their superintendent certification at an Illinois university. So Harvard and Stanford grads, NOPE, unqualified. The new superintendent killed the entire chemistry of the district, and with it the morale of the faculty and staff. He wants a top down authority structure and demands uniformity among the schools despite demographic differences. He has taken all power from the principals and department chairs. And, we are no longer “members of the team”, but his “employees.”
Thank God I was only four years out from retirement when he came. My wife is going through this in a nearby district. I hope she makes it to retirement. It came to the point that we told our daughter who was heading to college, “If you tell you want to teach, tuition money disappears.” That should say something coming from two well-educated, once-energized, career teachers. Sigh.
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I am so sorry your district fell apart. You did work in the promised land. I am so sorry they dismantled the garden. May I ask how you found this post? It’s been included in at least two college syllabi.
One of my sons works at a university and his managers are MBAs and know almost nothing about what he does. He says sometimes they meant to help, but more often they make his job more difficult. He has no idea how they spend their workday. Sadly, they have no idea how he spends his.
Sadly, that’s true of many administrators in many fields.
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