Random Thoughts on the Teaching Profession

When we moved to the metro-Atlanta area, I decided not to pursue either a full-time or a part-time teaching position at some local university or college. Oh, yeah, I looked at the position announcements, but after 25 years of teaching--many as a full-time instructor/lecturer or non-tenured assistant professor--I was tired and disenchanted. When I started blogging, I made a decision not to write about work or about the observations that led to my disenchantment. I had sat in too many faculty meeting discussions and read too many articles on how to address the "issue" of part-timers and non-tenured full-time faculty to think I could effect any change. And the bitching of academics gets tiresome pretty quickly.

Now my daughter wants to become a secondary English teacher, a career that engenders less respect than even a full-time lecturer position at a large university.

The general public--that is, people not associated with colleges and universities--do have respect for those who teach in higher education; they often do not understand the tenure structure or the teaching load or the pay. Years ago, when I was a full-time lecturer (with a contract that could be annually renewed, of course) at Texas A&M University, one of my uncles who had only completed high school dropped by to visit. He couldn't tell me enough how proud he was of a niece who was a teacher at a university. I hadn't the heart to tell him that I was an academic migrant worker, that most universities have time limits for their non-tenured faculty: three or four years and then one has to move on to the next post. I think he was a little non-plussed that I rented (a small house on a large ranch, this being Central Texas) and that my home wasn't as fine as his. Years later, a friend of mine at a small university here in Georgia related to me how people's attitudes seemed to change when she was hired as a full-time instructor at the local university. For years she had taught English in high school; she was a well-liked teacher. However, once she started teaching at the university, people who had condescended to her before (while she was teaching their children!) no longer did so; they were impressed with her new position.

My friend and I had attained master's degrees; hers was in education, mine in English. At this university, we had been promoted to the rank of assistant professor, a non-tenured position with no time limit beyond which our contracts could be renewed. She directed a lab and later a writing center; I taught four classes each semester, some semesters adult re-entry classes in the evenings, and directed a summer language program for Japanese students from Kiryu, Japan. We worked hard. But I don't think we worked any harder than good teachers in high schools throughout the country. Although my sisters, who teach middle-school and high-school students in Texas, had higher salaries than I, I thought that the respect I received teaching at a university, at whatever rank, somehow compensated for the lower pay. (Also, I didn't have to meet with parents or deal with the bureaucracy associated with public school teaching in this country.) Perhaps I was delusional.

I think public education would be improved in this country if teachers in public schools could be given the same respect, with better pay, as that bestowed on university professors. God knows, the respect that some university professors receive far outstrips their production and actual performance. Teachers of secondary education, particularly, should be required to attain at least a master's degree in their teaching subject, and they should be amply compensated.

I'm not sure how to increase respect for public school teaching, but attitudes are learned. One of my co-workers from Nigeria told me that in his country, "professors are like gods." He added, "They never have to carry their books to class because a student is always there to perform these kinds of duties for them."

Treating teachers like gods can lead to a different set of problems, but certainly, teachers do deserve more respect in this country. It just seems so surreal to me that the financiers who picked our pockets--and continue to do so--receive so much more respect and obscenely more pay than the teacher who taught them how to read and write, than the teacher who taught them how to appreciate the art they hang on their walls, or the teacher who taught them the second or third language they haltingly--or fluently--speak when they travel. I'm not against people being amply and generously recompensed for their high-stress, high-profile jobs. I just think teachers deserve more respect and more compensation, too.

"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.