Teachers are payed well.

Teachers have excellent health benefits.

Teachers get summers off…and weekends…and snow days.

Teachers are represented by strong Unions.

Teachers cannot be fired on the whim of an adminstrator, or because they have climbed too high on the payscale.

All true.  Also true:

Teachers have to earn and pay for a Masters Degree in order to earn permanent certification.

Teachers cannot earn promotions.

Teachers are not paid for their summers off.

Teachers cannot earn more pay for better quality of teaching.

Teachers do not earn bonuses.

Teachers cannot take a sick day without preparing and delivering plans for the full day of work even if they are on their deathbed.

Teachers pay out of pocket for classroom supplies to the tune of hundreds of dollars which is unrecognized by most.

Teachers spend hours and hours of time outside of school business hours preparing lessons, doing research, writing reports, correcting papers, recording grades, tracking progress notes, making phone calls, answering e-mails and notes from parents, attending meetings, writing curriculum, and developing methods…nevermind that the public *thinks* (I use that term loosely) that we only work seven hour days.  If you are a Special Education teacher, add about 40 hours a year that goes to writing IEP’s (Individualized Education Plans) during your “time off.”

Teachers manage to teach children, all children, irregardless of race, socioeconomic status, mental and emotional health, ability, and parental involvement (or lack thereof.)

Teachers manage to bend to the whim of State Ed which passes unfunded mandates and then three years later retracts them once we’ve revised our entire methodology to suit the initial mandate.

A teacher’s mission everyday is to instill an interest and love of learning in a classroom of 25 or so students made up of the willing and the unwilling, the smart and the challenged, the healthy and the emotionally unstable, the well cared for and the neglected, the loved and the abused, the motivated and the unmotivated, the content and the angry, the calm and the overactive, the sweet and the nasty, the well-behaved and the aggressive, the serious and the jokers. And that’s the easy part of the job.

I am SO SICK of schools being blamed for every societal crisis, from suicides, violent acts, societal apathy, teen pregnancy, to overprescribing of ADHD medications, to the inability of Americans to compete in the world market…and I am SO SICK of teachers being torn apart as overpayed and underworked leeches of Federal and State resources.  Is the school system perfect?  Of course not!  Is every teacher worthy of their position and salary?  Of course not!  But I  find it maddening to have my profession lambasted time and again by people who don’t know the first thing about what it means to be an Educator.

<Rant Over>

And now we return to our regularly scheduled non-controversial programming.  🙂