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A LOT MORE RESPECT  |
America faces a crisis
as it scorns its teachers
By LEN KLEMPNAUER
of TheColumnists.com
Quick! Name the
first synonym that comes into your mind for “Teacher.”
What did you come up with? Educator? Instructor? Lecturer?
Wrong!
Professor? Pedagogue? Academician?
Wrong again!
I’ll provide the answer in a moment, but first I should
confess my bias. I married a teacher, one of my two children
is a teacher, both my sisters married teachers, and one of my
nephews is a teacher.
I’m even proud to say that I have really close friends who
are teachers.
Here’s a much easier question: What’s the main problem
facing our public education system today?
The answer is easy: Teachers.
That’s the answer if you’re one of those who holds
teachers responsible for all the ills of education, maybe even
for all that ails American society. Teachers make easy targets
because they’re the most visible and, therefore, the most
vulnerable of our educators. Besides, everyone’s an expert
on teachers because the only work experience common to all of
us is school, whether plumber, secretary, doctor, judge, CEO
or president of the United States.
Critics find it easy to claim that teachers are spoiled, thanks
to their six-hour workdays, every weekend off, extended Christmas
and spring breaks, and three-month summer vacations. They really
have it made today. Right?
Well, not exactly.
Name another profession that pays so little for so much college
education:
*
Four years minimum for a bachelor’s degree (if you can get
all the required classes in four years).
*
Another year for a teaching credential.
*
Yet another year--if you can afford it--for a master’s degree
to provide a little bonus money that seldom compensates for the
cost of getting it in the first place.
*
And heaven knows how many more years for the 90 post-grad units--equivalent
to another three years of college--needed to move to the top
of your district’s salary schedule.
Mandatory in some districts, those continuing educational requirements
can eliminate a lot of those so-called carefree summer vacations
and leisurely weekends. They’ll eventually bring you more
money--in groups of 15 units--but they aren’t cheap to come
by either unless earned during the occasional in-house staff
development classes.
When I left the newspaper business in the early ‘80s and
joined a promising, but eventually failing microcomputer company,
four of the dozen or so colleagues in our department were former
teachers still in their 20s. Two were tech pubs writers. They
had been high school teachers who had majored in English and
minored in science. The third was an administrative assistant
and the fourth a secretary. They both had been elementary teachers.
It was a high-tech start-up, and we worked many 10-hour days
and weekends. Yet, the former teachers told me, they still labored
fewer hours than they worked as teachers and the pay was 50-
to 100-percent more than their teachers’ salaries.
Later, I moved to a small, start-up software company. My immediate
boss, in his mid-30s with a degree in computer science and a
minor in math, had originally wanted to become a high school
math teacher.
“It took five years to become a teacher but only four years
to get a degree in computers,” he once told me. “I
would have started off at $12,000 to $15,000 a year as a teacher
and probably at $25,000 in the computer industry. It didn’t
make financial sense for me to become a teacher and have to borrow
more money to attend college another year and make considerably
less money when I graduated. Besides, the future for advancement
in computers is unlimited.”
He was probably taking in 75 grand at the time.
That was in the mid-1980s. What was the top salary for a teacher
then--$35,000 a year? $40,000? That would be $40,000 with five
years of college, at least 90 units of post-graduate units and
probably 20 years’ experience in the same school district.
When teachers with 15 to 20 years’ experience move to another
district, they get maybe 10 years’ past credit? Name another
profession that rewards their professionals so unprofessionally.
Can you think of any other reasons so many new teachers in recent
years have been leaving the profession so soon--up to 40 percent
within their first five years?
Increasingly more paperwork? Ladder-climbing, autocratic administrators?
Belligerent or indifferent parents? Uncooperative and often bellicose
students? Untold hours preparing students for government-required
testing instead of doing what they were trained and expected
to do--teach? Yes to all.
What teachers don’t have today is what every teacher had
when I was in school: Respect.
To my parents, the teacher, the judge and the medical doctor
comprised the holy triumvirate.
No doubt there are lousy teachers today, just as there were lousy
teachers when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. But I’d
bet the percentage of incompetent teachers then and now equals
the percentage of incompetent plumbers, secretaries, doctors,
judges, CEO’s and U.S. presidents then and now.
But how do you determine who is a bad teacher? And who should
do the judging?
A case in point:
In my sophomore year in high school, I was taking a second year
of Spanish. There were about 25 of us in the class. I struggled
and spent at least two hours a night just on Spanish homework,
sometimes to the detriment of my other subjects. The teacher
was a crusty old fellow and had the reputation as being the hardest
teacher in school. For me, it was a matter of an “A”
or an “F.” There was no middle ground. I earned an
“A” in both semesters.
Also in that class was a fellow destined for one of the military
academies who flunked the first semester. He could not get into
the academy with even one “F” on his report card, he
told me. So he switched to another Spanish teacher, repeated
the class, and pulled an “A” in both semesters.
Was that first Spanish teacher a bad teacher?
He wasn’t for me, because I learned more about English grammar
from him than from any English teacher. He pounded into our heads
that you can’t learn the grammar of a foreign language unless
you first are proficient in your own.
He just wasn’t the right teacher for my buddy, who later
went on to learn two foreign languages fluently with conversational
ability in a third. I, on the other hand, never became fluent
in any foreign language, even though I took three years of high
school Spanish and three years of college German--and lived in
Germany four years. But I was really good at the grammar.
A second example:
American government--we called it "civics"--was required
of all high school seniors to graduate. The teacher, a female
this time, was known as the second-hardest teacher. If you received
an “A” on all homework, all weekly tests and on the
final in both quarters, the best grade you could get was a “C.”
To earn a “B” or an “A,” you had to do extra
work, and that extra work had to be of “B” or “A”
quality to get those grades. That rubbed me wrong.
I got a “D-“ at the end of the first quarter.
In the second quarter, I buckled down and received an “A”
on all homework and the weekly tests. Then came the final, and
was I prepared. I whipped through the 100 questions as if I had
compiled the exam. I then peeked over the shoulders of the girl
in front of me, a straight “A” student throughout high
school, to compare our answers. We only had three that differed.
I figured she wouldn’t miss more than five and if my three
different answers were incorrect, then my total would be 92--good
enough for a low “A” and surely adequate for a high
“B.”
The teacher gave me a “D+” for the second quarter,
despite the fact that I met all of her qualifications for a “C.”
It was my only “D” in high school.
(The teacher and I also had a couple of personality clashes,
and academic grades then frequently included what was known as
“citizenship.” I’ll always believe my attitude
influenced her.)
I still live in the same community and frequently get together
with people I knew in high school. Occasionally we talk about
our teachers--we still refer to them as Mrs. or Mr., even the
ones we later came to know when we were adults. (That’s
called respect.) A couple of classmates, one of them a valedictorian
and both former teachers, maintain that the civics teacher was
a really good teacher, and you knew exactly what she expected.
On the other hand, I’m aware of a couple of classmates who
flunked her civics class and didn’t graduate with us. One
later became a medical doctor and the other a psychologist.
She was the right teacher for some and the wrong teacher for
others. But she certainly wasn’t an incompetent teacher,
except, maybe in my biased eyes.
The problems teachers faced 50 years ago are miniscule compared
to today. Yet until we start paying them the respect and the
money they deserve, our schools are going to be in deep stuff.
In the next few years, 50 percent of today’s teachers will
be entering retirement age.
It’s time to stop blaming teachers and to start supporting
them in every way we can.
My moment has ended.
So what is the first word that comes into my head when I think
of teachers?
Scapegoat!
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The illustration
is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted
May 29, 2006.
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