"Those Who Can't. . . ."

When my daughter first told me she wanted to be an English teacher, I tried to dissuade her. Don't get me wrong. I value teaching. I taught English composition, business writing, and literature for twenty-five years for various colleges and universities, from Texas to Minnesota. But I also know first-hand--and second-hand, since my sisters are teachers in public schools--that our culture does not really value teaching. Years ago, two friends of ours who had majored in computer science stopped to visit on their way to bigger and better things (they ended up working in Virginia and Washington, one with the Pentagon). I had just begun teaching full-time as an instructor at Texas A&M University; Tom was working as a researcher for the Texas Forest Service. In conversation, comparing our lives since our years together as undergraduates, we must have described our salaries. Our friends looked at us pityingly and then said, by way of comforting us, "Well, you were always good at living on little."

Years later, when my brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon, told me he paid more for malpractice insurance than I made annually, I was crushed. And that was my annual salary for full-time teaching as an assistant professor. A few years later, teaching part-time at a couple of colleges in Texas, I calculated how much I made per hour, adding the number of hours I spent not just in the classroom but grading essays, responding to e-mails from students, reading and critiquing rough drafts of students' writing, and preparing lesson plans. My hourly rate was just barely over minimum wage. Now, my sisters, who teach in public school rather than at public universities, had higher annual salaries than I did when I taught full-time at a small university in Georgia, but they also dealt with far more student-behavior issues and parent-teacher issues than I did.

Not only pay, but attitudes toward teachers suggest how little we value teaching. This past week, I was reminded of such attitudes when my daughter and I sat in her high-school counselor's office. We were there for the pre-college pep talk, to discuss my daughter's academic plans for her senior year in high school as well as her plans for college. When the counselor learned that M-M wanted to be a high-school English teacher, she grimaced and said, "Oh, I could never be a teacher. I couldn't handle all those kids. But then... well, I'm a doer."

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. This was a high school counselor giving credence to that old--faulty--adage: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

The attitude wasn't lost on my daughter, either, of course. Later I told her that the negative attitude of her counselor was one that she would encounter again and again as a teacher, especially as a secondary-school teacher.

With her grades, skills, and talents, my daughter could pursue any number of more lucrative and more valued careers. Instead, she is following in the footsteps of her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, great-aunts, and several great-great aunts: she wants to be a teacher. Over the shock, I tell her it's a fine profession. I loved teaching. But I would have loved, also, being better compensated for my efforts good work.