thehappycon
I hate it when teachers complain about not getting paid enough. Do you hear the guy at the 7-11 complain about his pay? How about the folks at Hardee’s? Hy-Vee?
Nope. And all these people get paid a lot less than teachers for working many, many more hours.
Teachers love to ask for more pay. It’s for the children, they say. Here’s what happens if you give more money to the schools:
My high school has 120-ish kids, thirty per class. I never actually took chemistry because we didn’t have a chem teacher. Still don’t. We had one AP class for one year; now we have none. We watched Monty Python and ran to Casey’s for donuts in Spanish II.
But now we have a teacher for ISS. That’s in-school-suspension, where kids sit and think about all the bad things they’ve done, and repent. Apparently, we have the money to pay someone forty grand a year to watch the trouble makers. In his off time, he’s going to help children in the weightroom and coach football.
Wait a minute…..we just hired a football coach. We took the money, given ostensibly for the purpose of actually teaching children something, and spent it on a football coach. Our fifth since I was a freshman in high school seven years ago.
Regardless of the fact that Vince Lombardi couldn’t make those seventeen 150 lb teenagers win three games, the decision is flawed. High school is about learning. I have nothing against high school sports; I hold thirteen varsity letters. And I’m the only kid out of thirty in my high school class who gets paid to work out - and I get paid by the Army. Other things matter too, however. Like chemistry. And calculus. And learning to read, something that a fair number of my classmates probably still do only with great difficulty.
Funding for schools is fine, but it’s badly allocated and badly monitored. When my dad was in school, the high school had six National Merit Semifinalists. Now we don’t even take the test anymore. If you’ve got money for a coach to sit around and listen to Back in Black all day, why can’t we spend some of that on a foreign language teacher? How about a science teacher? Maybe somebody who’s graduated college with a degree in the subject they’re allegedly teaching?
But thank goodness we’re the only public school in the nation to have a football coach who doesn’t teach a class.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: College, Education, high school, school funding, Tarkio, teachers
If your school is the only one in the nation, or even the state, with a football coach who does not teach, I will eat my hat. We also have a coach who babysits the ISS room, one who taught me less than nothing in the physics classroom, several who supervise the madness that is boy’s PE and weightlifting…you get the idea. But apparently a big man is needed in the ISS room, because when that coach was gone last spring, they moved the physics teacher over and I subbed in physics, because policy indicated that a woman did not sub in the ISS room. Our football team actually wins sometimes, though. Go figure.
Ok, I stand chastened. But it’s still not a good thing, no? And I’m pretty sure it’s even worse if your school has only 120 kids to begin with. How many people can be suspended at once?
Better question yet: Why is this even allowed? Shouldn’t the money go elsewhere?
I agree, it shouldn’t happen. But when was the last time you saw the community gathering together to cheer on students taking the ACT? To some extent, I think schools know that sports are a way to garner community support.
But let’s talk about teacher salaries. For starters, friend, if people at 7-11, Hy-Vee, etc, never complain about their salary, why does minimum wage keep going up? You’re telling me the employees on your farm don’t ever wish they made more?
When I start teaching, I’ll have my masters. Why shouldn’t I earn more than an average employee at 7-11? I’ll be working just as hard, and I’ll have significantly more training than their job requires. However, I acknowledge that the world is not perfect, and I chose my career because of my interests rather than my wallet, so I’ll teach whether there are salary increases or not.
I would think that a teacher truly worth his or her salt might feel the need on occassion to request a higher salary, but they should be spending more time seeking funding to further the education of their students. That’s the career goal of a teacher, to help produce young people with enough training to be successful in the work force. Because of this, I favor the sometimes unpopular notion of paying teachers who can teach subjects like upper level math or science, or special education, a little extra. I won’t be certified in those areas, so I wouldn’t be eligible for extra money. However, living with two biology majors has taught me that I don’t WANT to be certified in those areas. Paying people for extra qualifications seems standard in other areas of business, why not education? After all, what is the point of my work to teach students foundational concepts of math and science if they can’t receive the higher level training they need when they get to high school? It seems as if that would turn my job into an exercise in futility.
Funding should go to helping teachers at all levels have access to the materials they need to fully educate their students, in my opinion. Where do you think it should go?