Five years into teaching and heading out, forever or for a while, I would like everyone who questions any aspect of the profession to try it for a week. Try waking up at 5.00 every morning to get to school hours before the kids, head home hours after the kids have left to spend hours preparing for the next day. Try battling a combusting photocopier to make your days copies, your lifelines. Try quieting thirty sugar-high, hormonal, distracted teenagers for long enough to teach your lesson. Try dealing calmly with gum chewing, secret texting, calling out, nasty comments, and outright disrespect. Try calling frustrated, exhausted or antagonistic parents. Try grading piles of assignments and inputting grades by 8.00am on Monday. Just try, just for a week.
"If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults — a result that won’t show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics.
That’s easy to forget, as budget battles rage and teacher performance is viewed through the cold metrics of the balance sheet. While the love of literature and confidence I gained from Ms. Leibfried’s class shaped my career and my life, after only four short years at Hibbing High School, she was laid off because of budget cuts, and never taught again."
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