I am a
teacher and no one cares. If I do my job
really well, no one complains. If I do a
shitty job, people complain. Either way,
I don’t lose my job, and I don’t get paid any more money. As long as I don’t rape a student, get
altered with students, or flagrantly cheat, I’m not going to get fired. Conversely, even if I raise the average ACT
score of my students five points, spend six hours a night grading papers, and
provide in-depth counseling for the troubled, teenage souls in my building, I
will not get one cent more in my paycheck than the fucking slacker who turns a
movie on every day and hands their students answers to the summative
assessments for their subject area.
Tell me
again why I try so hard. Tell me again
why I read every book I teach for every class again every year. Tell me again why I get grief for not being
more present in the hallways and at school functions, because I teach in a
discipline which sucks up all my free time.
I can’t
even pay my bills. I put my phone bill
on a credit card this month, because I can’t afford to pay all my bills. I have a job that I’ve worked my ass off at
for 10 years, but I can’t get ahead, because my chosen profession is as a
teacher. If I wanted to semi-lobotomize
myself and get a degree in administration where I do a whole lot of nothing
other than coming up with BIG IDEAS for other people to implement, then I get
paid some more. But if I want to do the
thing that (I think) I’m pretty good at, I have to be satisfied with being
marginally poor for the rest of my life.
Awesome.
If you
want to be a teacher, marry rich. Or don’t
have children. And certainly don’t have
any expectations that your life will be fabulous in any material sort of
way. All good has to be taken from the
experience. To be honest, that
experience is worth it most of the time.
But it would be really great to be paid according to the outcome of what
I do.
I guess
the thing that really pissed me off about this was that I went grocery shopping
yesterday, something which makes me incredibly angry, because it’s so god damn
expensive. But yesterday I went shopping
at a shitty No Frills in Bellevue.
Totally run-down, crappy place.
And the food was more expensive!!
Someone tried to tell me it’s because they have to accommodate for the
theft which occurs in poorer places, but I say, “bullshit!” Rich, suburban people steal just as much as
poor people! And they are probably more
blatant with their theft. I will admit
right now that I went to Walmart to buy mulch (in a wealthy suburb), and I
loaded the mulch I bought into my car along with three bags of soil I didn’t
buy. I stole it. Why? I
have no idea, other than that I didn’t have enough money and the opportunity
was there.
The
point is not that I’m a thief and a criminal, but that I have to ration the
things I buy, because I can’t afford anything.
I’m going to either have to quit a job I love doing so that I can slowly
climb out of crippling debt, or keep teaching and dig a financial hole so deep
that my children will inherit nothing but unpaid bills and latent
hostility.
It’s
fucked up. And because I have degrees in
education and English, I can’t do anything to fix it.
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