Five Things You Hate about Teachers and What You Can Do About Them. . ..

5. We Have Summers Off.

(And Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving. . . ) So many breaks, you’d expect EVERYone would try to become teachers. I can’t count how many times people work this issue into the conversation once they discover I am a career teacher. Currently, close to two-thirds of newly minted teachers quit the profession within three years of gaining a full-time teaching position, never to return. Maybe, as people like to blithely assert, they were women with a “Mrs. Degree” who were just waiting for Mister Right to marry them, so they could work at home raising their own kids and not yours. Maybe they landed a rewarding spot on American Idol. But whatever it is, summer breaks are just not long enough to keep that two-thirds in education for a career.

Just the other day, in fact, a man standing next to me in the UPS line overheard I was a teacher; he baldly squawked, “You know, I hear these complaints about them teacher salaries…(I had not been complaining about a thing.)  Y’all got three months off in the summer, go get a job in the summer if you all want more money instead of sitting on your rear ends.” He said so with a pleasant smile like insulting someone you just met about their professions is completely socially acceptable, like so many other people do to teachers.

I just sighed and did not correct his grammar, nor his incorrect count of how much time I have off in the summers. I didn’t even try to discuss how many hours we work in a year stuffed into ten months. . .nor how many redundant classes I have to take each Summer in my time off. . .nor did I explore the offensive skewed salary scale/experience/hours-worked ratio of teachers compared to other more lucrative careers, like lawyers and doctors–Three degrees, 70 hour weeks, for what-per-hour??  I learned to stop doing that a long time ago.

I simply smile now and say, “Oh, I agree. Why don’t you go into teaching, so you can enjoy summers off?” and walk away.

4. We can’t be fired.

I know. That dirty thing called tenure. First, be honest: every job has due process, every single one. If you have not enjoyed due process when you were let go, then either you were screwed and you need a lawyer, or you were laid off through RIF.

Teachers get cut when there are not enough jobs, and we sometimes meet the nasty end of due process. I have known teachers who have lost their jobs for being drunk, stoned, or just bad. I have known drunk docs and immoral lawyers who are still practicing, protected by members of their profession. All it takes in any case is a boss who is willing to do the paper work, willing to apply due process, yet often they are too busy, or too political, or even too lazy to do so.

Consider an obstacle in education personnel decisions that doesn’t exist in other fields. To fire a teacher brings public scrutiny. (How often do most jobs and their failings get accounted for in the media? No one cares if a teller or a computer programmer gets axed. And unless a lawyer or a doctor goes to jail, no one reports their dropped contracts.  But a teacher? When a teacher loses a job, the community often makes a newsworthy stink.

Education is always in the media; it is a political machine that is fodder for the public. In fact, I recently heard yet another dig at tenure on Tim Allen’s last comedy.

But imagine you have a school principal willing to bring on public scrutiny and fulfill due process anyway to get rid of the “bad teacher”: to prove someone is a weak teacher is difficult since the standard for quality varies and seems subjective.

Sure, you’d think that the public would all agree about which teacher is good, but people really don’t. For instance, the guy who curses in class, yells at your kids till they cry, has a high failure rate, but gets fantastic results on Nationally-Normed Tests. . .do we keep him?  Or how about the teacher who is cheerful, supportive, motivates quality projects from children, coaches everything, has a high pass rate, but a somewhat questionable result on national tests. . .which educator is best? Not everyone values test results as the only indicator of talent in a teacher.  Some people adore the tough assholes and see them as demanding challengers, and some people want their children adored and cushioned.

I have worked with all sorts of teachers.  The woman who is always on-time and rarely misses a day, who keeps excellent records and files, whose bulletin boards are oh-so-spiffy seems like such a great  employee. But wait. . .she assigns too much silent bookwork, and sits at her desk daring the children to speak or complain; they are bored stiff and hardly learning, yet the teacher breaks no rules.   Then there is the well-loved, creative teacher with fun, interactive lessons, but she’s hopeless at discipline, and gee, she seems to miss a lot of Mondays and often skips her lunch duty. . .but, my goodness, look at those stellar literacy scores!  And then there is the favorite coach, who runs a tight ship in his history class, and motivates his kids to achieve and mature into respectable adults; however, his emails home seem illiterate, and his lessons are mimeographed from 1972. . .

Many principals face these very real conflicts: teachers who have strengths and weaknesses.

It is rare to hire perfection, which is what we expect in our teachers.  We want great, dependable employees, intellectual subject experts with creative and up-to-date lesson plans, fantastic human relations gurus, entertaining performers, kind and compassionate, moral leaders, but also strong disciplinarians who never have a rough day or show any weakness. . .Tough to find in one human being.

Plus, each principal knows the old adage: the devil you know is sometimes better than the devil you don’t know, causing them to try to rehab rather than replace their weaker faculty.

Plus, time constraints affect a principal’s staffing choices in ways that do not occur in other careers.  Due process takes any boss precious time to document; however, when a principal finally succeeds at letting the flawed teacher go, and then hunts for someone better, finding a stronger applicant takes months, which can leave your children without a teacher.  No one wants that.  You’d think in this economy, talent would be climbing out of our pores. But, no, not so.  Worse, trying to hire qualified replacements in classically “tough” schools with higher crime, higher failure, is nearly impossible; few apply. Fewer stay.

So stop thinking that teachers can’t be fired. We can, just as easily as you. The difference is that when people lose a job in most industries, the boss just makes their colleagues pick up the slack.   Principals cannot do that; children are not “tasks” that can be dumped on someone else’s docket.  Losing a teacher may mean leaving a classroom with a sub whose only credentials are a high school diploma and a pulse.

(And update:  Covid issues have only made this problem far worse.)

3. We were often “C” level students in college or high school.

The most embarrassing statistics prove this true. While that doesn’t describe me or many of my fellow teachers, it is generally correct. What’s worse, teacher’s education programs are notoriously tedious in work load, but lacking in intellectual demands, so we are talking about “C” students in non-rigorous degrees.

What are you willing to do about it?

You demand excellence from medical students and law students and even engineers, why not education majors? (Well, I personally think there should be no such thing as undergraduate education majors; I am as appalled as you when I discover one of my children’s teachers or a colleague is a numbskull).  The cut off point for staying in a medical, engineering or law program is exceptionally high for students: most must maintain a 3.5 or higher.  Enrollees who fail to meet these GPA requirements or to pass their boards or oral exams are out of luck; afterall, we do not want someone to design a bridge or replace a heart valve who has a 60 percent knowledge of the subject, right?  But education majors can carry a 1.8 GPA; they have no oral exams.  To pass an education certification board exam is super easy.  I can honestly say, failing the English Educators exam in my state means the teacher must be barely literate.

Much of my explanation about tenure applies here. The trouble is. . .whenever any state does raise standards, folks stop going into the teaching profession, or scarier, fewer folks qualify or meet those standards, resulting in a teacher shortage. With that, we are forced to hand out provisional teaching certificates to people with no training at all just to fill the podiums.  This is a nasty cycle that experts and politicians have failed to break.

Does this problem exist because academically sound graduates have plenty of work options. . .? Do you want someone teaching your kids who had no other choices?

Understand, school systems are victimized by supply and demand, stymied by funds, and hindered by even colleges and what they expect from or teach their education majors.  Not enough high-level high school graduates go into education programs; then not enough stellar college graduates go into teaching, which leaves the richer counties in position to competitively hire the best candidates, and the rest to accept the left-overs.  Plus, “best candidates” are hard to judge since so many education degrees come from paper mills.

Notice each state supports only one or two medical schools and offers few law or advanced engineering programs making the system of credentialing these professionals selective…But education degrees? Almost all colleges and universities everywhere graduate them. . .which leaves the resulting talent pool suspect.

How can you mock the low achievements of teachers when you also expect such low standards of them to begin with?

2. We are with your kids more than you are.

Admit it. When you first sent your babies off to school, aside from the secret joy you felt that you had more free time, or that your day care bill was shrinking, you were uncomfortable with someone else being so central in your child’s life.

Studies in child development show that children shift their hero-identity focus from parent to teacher around first grade. So instead of your son or daughter believing your word is God-like, now it’s “Mrs. Belachik says this. Mrs. Belachik says that. ..” ad nauseum. This does not sit right.  In fact this sits so poorly with some parents that I have watched my friends and neighbors tear apart teachers behind the closed doors of Bunko games, book clubs, and scrap booking meets, discussing their children’s teacher’s clothes, hair, and personal lives-from wedding faux pas, to pregnancies, and even husbands, as if we teachers are cast members of Housewives of Education County, not the professionals who love your kids.

Jealousy is an ugly beast to feed.

Add in that we are around your elementary-aged kids for 8 hours a day while you are with them, once they finish their bus rides, perhaps 6 waking hours–some of which they spend with buddies, computers, television and not you. . .You should feel a little threatened.   Even in high school, teachers seem to spend more time with your kids than you do, since as teens mature, they spend even less time with their parents.

An uncomfortable truth: Today’s families rarely eat, ride in cars, or watch television together… But teachers are in your kids’ faces for a good portion of their lives; so important, we teachers.

1. We are the government (who once controlled you.)

You may think Summers should be my biggest reason you hate teachers.  But no.  It’s the fact that we are the government that burns you up. And a government that once had total control over you and wouldn’t let you sleep in class…

Many people try to overcome this truth by acting like they are no longer under the thumb of a teacher, but now the boss who pays teachers’ salaries.  (That’s another insulting comment people like to spit at strangers!)  “I pay that woman to teach, not give my kid detention!” Or “I pay you to get my kid into college, why isn’t he getting an A?”  Or some such variation… Never mind that you pay the salaries of everyone who provides you a good or service–launderers, policemen, doctors–somehow with teachers, you feel more smug bossiness.  I’ve never heard someone say “I pay my doctor’s salary, how come I have heart disease!”  or “My taxes pay for that cop’s job, how come he arrested my kid for drunk driving.”  But woe to the teacher who offends your wishes and desires.

Perhaps, what makes you so irritable is that this “salary” you pay teachers just pops right out of your paycheck as a tax and moves into a system that the media loves to tell you is failing, a system that once controlled you, a system that is overrun with politicians and government debacles.

Think of how we feel.  Geez.

Imagine when you have been shaped to question any form of government, its intentions, its policies, its spending, its system of “checks and balances”, its buddy politics. . .and then you go to work for that very government.  It is your boss.

Most people I know who stand around at cocktail parties complaining about the governor, the president, the Republicans, the Democrats, etc.. are the same ones who complain about education. Ironically, they don’t seem to know that any education system is one of the most political machines out there.

Who sets the education budget? The government of that state. Who defines standards? The government of that state (along with those people who moved out of the classroom usually within six years of their teaching career to become politicians/lobbyists on some governor’s panel.)

Who runs your local system? A board that campaigns for office. Who puts principals into power over your teachers? That very board.  How does one gain notice to earn a position of power from the board? Play into that board’s belief system. Who earns leadership roles under those same principals? The political ones who say, “Yes!” to his/her every whim, no matter how ridiculous it seems.

Can you recall any local or national election that did not have education as one of its central platforms? Never forget that in education all leaders, from principals to every member of the central office and the board, are politicians.  The system is designed to eliminate individual insight and creativity, and endorse sycophantic behavior. I imagine this is true in the business world too, or comic strips like Dilbert wouldn’t be so popular.

Teachers are at the mercy of any politician who is staging a campaign to his constituents. If you voters make it sound like you want higher standards, he says he will attach pay-to-performance. He doesn’t care what massive testing does to your kids in the long run; he doesn’t even care if it’s a valid evaluation system. (Before you get all up in arms over student testing  linked to teacher careers, I am all for it, once it is fair, infallible, irrefutable, and valid-but right now it is only political and meaningless.) If you demand more discipline, then he creates a zero-tolerance law. Or the opposite, if you are tired of zero-tolerance rules, suddenly there are no rules. . .

And here’s a dirty secret: Many politicians use studies to prove whatever their whims are. In the science world, studies are usually strictly validated. Not so in education. The education studies that politicians toss around are performed by students seeking degrees in education programs. . .education programs that are not rigorous. . .education programs that don’t care that the study sample was too small, or even “made up.”  Education programs never truly require validity testing in their published studies. Yes. True. Scary. (Did you not see my answer to Complaint Number 3?)

Remember, education curricula are not science programs; they are not required to apply nor even study empirical, objective testing methods at all.  The results can be skewed or misrepresented.  The study itself can be set up in an invalid format.  Their results are not submitted to any peer reviews nor retested the way medical or psychological experiments are for validity.  But anyone running for any office gloms onto those slim, invalid studies.

And if such studies are performed by a group that is not in an education degree track, then the group is trying to make money for their byproduct book, or they are a political lobbying group. Thus evidential studies the politicians lean on are not standardized; They are filled with flaws, and distortions.

The fact that education is so politicized is damaging to your children, but somehow the taxation part is the only aspect you reject?  Look more deeply.

Okay. . .so. . .What can you do about any of this?

So. . .Here we teachers are, maligned for our free summers, mocked because we are par-educated, resented because we get to see your kids more than you, disrespected because we are “the man.”   Go ahead and toss in that, even though we suffer from the very government you do, we whimsically were once in charge of you when you were a student and you hated school–couldn’t wait to graduate–for we gave you tests someone else told us to give, we demanded that you read things that some board approved, and sometimes we were rude to you because we were too busy with the other 37 kids in class. Probably.

No wonder you hate us.

Yet Resentment doesn’t bring change.  Don’t just vote your people into office; examine the promises they make against reality. (You Floridians once actually believed your governor when he promised to cut the sizes of English classes in half. Californians at one point believed that every kid would get a state provided laptop. HELL, a whole load of people believed The Clintons and then The Bushes that everyone could be above average by this century. Really? Do the math. Go review the definition of average.)

Examine who moves into power and why in your entire education system. And definitely pay attention to how the money is spent.

Most importantly, help come up with a clear cut picture of a good vs. a bad teacher. Discuss this seriously with your friends and coworkers. Principals and parents each have their personal opinions that vary vastly. I have known bad teachers–ones that seem illiterate–whom parents will defend to the end. I have known great teachers whom parents want to lynch simply because they weren’t passing out “A’s” like candy. So collectively, as a country we have to agree with what defines good teaching and then be willing to enforce it. As it is now, many of you don’t even agree about norm testing.

And if you know of teachers who are truly bad, like grading arbitrarily, sleeping at their desk, drinking from their cupboards, writing illiterately in their email. . .document it, take it to the board, force the principal into due process. Don’t just criticize it.

Require improvement in the talent pool. I personally believe teachers should have to have Bachelor’s degree in any tough core subject, then complete a rigorous Masters degree in Education before being credentialed. Getting into these graduate programs should require stellar GRE scores, not the current, lower-than-national average scores. Then, prior to being certified, teachers should pass boards that are as strict as those for other important professionals.

Ask yourself why this profession doesn’t draw/keep its intellectual talent. What can we do to make it more, say, palatable to smarter people? You know the answer to this is very difficult to admit, which is why you probably are not a teacher with your summers free.

Teaching is a tough, sometimes completely unrewarding job; as a taxation-based field, it can never offer financial rewards on par with other intellectually demanding careers. My own test scores and academic records could have led me to med school or law school. But I wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t care about the money. I hate blood and I hate legalese. My career rewards are my students’ success. But this isn’t enough to draw everyone to teaching.

Since the certification methods are unlikely to change, instead, you must politically, and openly press your administrators to hire folks from the toughest colleges, with the highest scores on whatever test is most current for certification. Make it public. Make it embarrassing if you have to.  But make that happen.

Right now, pretty much all level colleges, from the “we take anyone with a pulse” community colleges to the private Ivy League offer teaching degrees. Only three locations in my state now offer law or medical degrees. You want “smarter” teachers, you have to change THAT!  Expect selectivity in education programs.

About your jealousy…It doesn’t matter how normal it is for your kids to transfer hero worship to us; even I, as a parent, want to clock a teacher now and then when I think she thinks she knows more about my kid than I do. I completely understand your discomfort. Once I became a mom, I learned how to communicate with parents of my students, for I suddenly related to what they fear. But build a positive relationship with your child’s teachers.

I can admit as a teacher, for parents who talk to me as a partner, not a servant, not an enemy, not a rival, somehow, I am psychologically unable to neglect their child. As a parent, I try hard to see my children’s teachers as part of my team and make sure they know it.

There is much you can do to improve education. Do something. Don’t just walk up to a teacher you have just met and unload your personal bitterness. We are not the enemy, no matter how much you hated your 11th grade calculus teacher.