I have two papers due on Friday. Eighteen essays to grade. Finals to give and report cards to finish. But, I have to give a silent, in my brain, fist pump whenever my facebook friends start to get angry about teacher-type status updates. “Three days until summer vacation!!!!!!” “Can’t believe I have to start setting up my class room in six weeks, ugh!” – clearly, even I am at fault. But I was sitting in class last night, with a delightful group of teachers, almost-teachers, never-be-teachers, and my favorite professor in the history of higher higher education, thinking about the vocation of teaching. What are we doing to ourselves?
How often do I hear “oh you’re a teacher, isn’t that nice.” I’m not stupid. I know you’re over there, judging me, silently doing the math in your head of how much I’m not making, deciding that I’m unmotivated and milking the system for every penny I can get my hands on. I will be content with a middle class life as long as the government is paying for it long after my retirement. Please be sure to make that argument to my public school contemporaries because over here, in the world of, “we can fire you for looking at a student the wrong way, and it’s actually penned into your contract in that exact phrase,” nothing is free. Not even my sanity.
“Oh but you guys get summers off!” – Who are these mystical teachers who can afford not to work three months out of the year? Working two jobs. Going to school at night. Taking your work home with you everyday. This is the reality. This is why teachers become obsessed with their jobs and why the involvement cycle is such a mind fuck. You give your whole life to your students. You sacrifice weekends, relationships, mental health and then at the end of the year they leave and you have a few weeks to get it together and put on the happy face, just to know you’ll have to do it all again next year. Exhaustion is an understatement.
I think there is a difference between complaining (what the republicans call it) and telling it like it is. I am so very blessed to have a job I love. Students I mostly adore. A graduate program that is (not at all) affordable. But the status discrepancy is getting old – what teachers do is important. Teachers know this. But the rest of the world seems oblivious.
