I am a
teacher. I am a parent. I am a coach.
These three things rarely conflict, but they always intersect. With one of my kids attending the high
school where I teach and another one attending our feeder junior high, it’s
quite impossible for the worlds not to collide.
Most of the time, I don’t even think about it; I don’t think my kids are
mortified by my presence in their school district, nor am I embarrassed by
their (sometimes outrageous) personalities in my place of work. So the whole thing is kind of symbiotic; I
like it.
One of
the many overlaps is sports-related. I
could go on a very long (and tedious) rant about that whole shit-fest right
now, but I won’t. Here’s what I want to
talk about: TIME.
Simply driving
my kids to their various sporting events and then sitting on my ass for hours
at a time is exhausting. I realize that
I’m not actually doing physical activity during these sporting events, but
there is something intrinsically draining about sitting on a metal bench and
cheering on a bunch of teenagers with a ball.
Anyway,
I digress. Yesterday, I took my
13-year-old to three basketball games (she plays for four different teams), and
then all the feeder teams were invited to watch the varsity girls’ basketball
game, followed by a pizza party. Fun
stuff, right? I actually dropped my
child off at the high school, went home, felt like an asshole for not attending
the “party”, and drove back to the school.
I watched the varsity girls’ game, and then everyone ate pizza, and then
we watched the boys’ varsity game. Sum
total for the day = about 10 hours.
That’s
not my point, though. I had children, so
I don’t get to complain about their activities.
My
point is that when we went to the high school basketball games and the pizza
party (in the cafeteria, so, at the high school) I saw about 30 other teachers
there. They were taking tickets when I
walked in the door, they were supervising the different games happening in the
building, they were coming back from other games/tournaments/events with their
extracurricular events, they were selling concessions, they were sponsoring
their cheerleaders/dance team/step squad members, and they were supporting
their own kids, who happened to be playing in those games.
Bottom
line: being a teacher means that you are
sucked into the vortex of high school almost all day, all the time. A lot of those teachers were doing the extra
hours simply because it pays well, and they don’t make enough actually educating people to pay their bills
and/or get ahead. We don’t get to just
go home at the end of the day and leave work at work, because the very nature
of our job requires more than just showing up 9-5.
The guy
who coached the varsity girls’ basketball team tonight, for example, didn’t
just spend an hour at the school during that game. He spends five days a week running practice,
and dozens of hours every week watching film in order to coach properly. And then he’s got to do the bro-huddle
bullshit that comes with any coaching position, where he kisses the asses of
the principals and the athletic director and the athletes’ parents.
On and
on and on … until teachers spend one too many days on a bus, missing their OWN
children’s activities, and then they quit out of utter frustration and
exhaustion. Our current public school
system model sucks. No other jobs
requires that kind of personal sacrifice for such mediocre pay. And if
a person wants a teaching job (especially in high school), they will commit to
sponsoring a club or sport. Period.
Well
done, America. Way to have your
priorities straight.
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