My life is a life of teaching, but it is not the same as the life of teachers. Teachers have a different type of employment (not easier, not harder--not the same). The pay for teachers is not always less than the pay for professors; however, it usually is, and this makes sense to me: the degree requirements for becoming a teacher are less than the degree requirements for becoming a professor. Regardless, good teachers are not respected nearly enough.
As a professor, I am not really a teacher: I do not have the same discipline challenges that high school, middle school, and elementary school teachers have. I may have discipline challenges, but they are different. Teachers work with children (of various mental capacities) and their parents. Professors work with adults (of various ages and mental capacities). The difference, however, in terms of outcome is the same: intellectual growth (tied to emotional growth and other forms of growth).
So, when I read an article such as Michael Winerip's "For Detroit Schools, Hope for the Hopeless" in The New York Times, I have to wonder at what we have taught people to understand about the nature of teaching. Mr. Bobb is an example of someone who clearly needs to go back to college, if not to high school. Having converted Detroit's public school system to a charter school system, in order to save money, Mr. Bobb has found that he "has set off a vicious cycle undermining even good schools. The more schools he closes to save money, the more parents grow discouraged and pull their children out. The fewer children, the less the state aid, so Mr. Bobb closes more schools." Mr. Bobb, if you were in my class, I would fail you for poor logical thinking and planning.
However, I am actually afraid of Mr. Bobb. Mr. Bobb was hired by the governor of Michigan at an annual salary of $425,000.00 to reduce the Detroit School district's $200,000.00 deficit. Mr. Bobb's solution was to turn public schools into private charter schools, closing many schools and firing many teachers. Did his solution work? No. That deficit has now gone up to $327,000.00. What if the governor of not-quite-yet-so-poverty-stricken Ohio decides to hire Mr. Bobb, or someone like him, to run both school districts and universities--turning them all into private institutions?
This is the least of my worries.
I have a lot of worries. I worry about the struggles in North Africa--and when will Gadhafi be driven out of power? I worry about Japan and New Zealand and Haiti--to name just a few of the areas suffering under major natural disasters. I worry when elected officials (no matter how minor) say that disabled and mentally ill individuals should be shipped off to Siberia because they are "defective" (Matthew Descmond). I worry that equal rights between men and women in the workforce (all over the world) has become a muted and ignored issue, so muted that people like Daniel Craig have to perform gimmicks to gain attention for the farce of unequal pay that still exists today.
I worry about senators, and especially the House Speaker, spending so much time and energy to ban gay marriage when there are so many, many REAL issues out there to be solved. Why hold a "war" on people for being who and what they are; why deny anyone such basic civil rights? And why did that crazy congressman in Georgia want to introduce a bill that would make getting an abortion "human prenatal murder" and to even prosecute women who suffer miscarriages (see "Rep. Bobby Franklin Might Hate Women More than He Hates Gays")?
Above all, however, I worry about the way that the rich--and those bought in order to work for the rich--are picking upon the not-rich (the middle class and the impoverished). There is battle between the elite rich (be they in the United States, Libya, or elsewhere) exploit the over-worked poor. They do not want a Middle Class--that level of income and affluence is just too hard for them to control--or so they think. (See, for a humorous twist on one aspect of this issue, The Daily Show's skit, "Crisis in Dairyland--For Richer and Poorer--Teachers and Wall Street.") I thank one of my colleague's for posting a link on Facebook to an article that reminds us of how bad things were 100 years ago, and how bad they still are today. Almost 100 years ago (March 25, 1911), the Triangle Waist Company, caught fire and nearly 150 workers (most of whom were Jewish and Italian immigrant girls ranging in age from their teens to their early twenties) died. According to Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen, "...the deaths clearly demonstrated that companies like Triangle, if left to their own devices, would not concern themselves with their workers' safety," and that, today, "...we still hear much of the same rhetoric whenever reformers seek to use government to businesses to act more responsibly and protect consumers, workers, and the environment" ("The Triangle Fire of 1911, And the Lessons for Wisconsin and the Nation").
Consider this, in the United States, legislation is currently struggling (plotting, planning, playing) with the below facts:
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| THIS IS WHAT CLASS WAR LOOKS LIKE "The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance." |
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