Sunday, August 29, 1999
Teachers: This column's for you
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Teachers are saints, most of them. Look up “saint” in the dictionary. It says, “a person who is exceptionally meek, charitable and patient.” Yes.
After parents, they're our first line of defense. They're with our children more than we are. Until June, we'll trust them with our kids for six hours a day. We'll expect them to handle this ponderous burden lightly.
Personally, I don't want to deal with anyone else's children but my own. Sometimes, I don't want to mess with my own kids, either.
Teachers have no choice. They're the good guys. This column is for them.
My wife teaches high school. She makes $35,000 a year. She coaches. Divide the number of hours she spends coaching by the money she is paid to coach, the hourly wage is about 79 cents. Somebody tell Rick Pitino.
And my wife teaches in the suburbs. She's got it easy.
The school isn't caving in around her. Everything works. We'll commit $400 million to a football stadium while our city schools drip watery plaster from ceilings that went up before the Roosevelt Administration. The Theodore Roosevelt Administration.
The kids she teaches are respectful. They come mostly from successful, two-parent homes. She doesn't have to lend them money, drive them home, counsel them or be their stand-in parent. She isn't doing social work. She can just teach.
Her school isn't a “secure area.” Yet. She doesn't pass through a metal detector, say good morning to a security guard or wave at surveillance cameras. See-through backpacks aren't mandatory.
In Washington, D.C., they are installing “video-linked intercom entry systems” at the main entrances to elementary schools. If your face isn't familiar, you don't get in. At D.C. high schools, all students have “digital photo identification cards.”
At a high school in the Washington suburbs, they're conducting a “simulated crisis” to show students what to do if somebody starts shooting the place up. It's the fire drill of the new millennium.
“Students should be looking at their books, not over their shoulders,” Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend told The Washington Post.
When did we stop taking that for granted?
If you are single and a young teacher, you do not own a home. You do not drive a new car, unless you are willing to give up something else.
You don't take expensive vacations, you don't go on clothes-shopping sprees. You don't eat much at restaurants with table service. You balance your checkbook religiously because, well, you never know.
If you live in a nice apartment, chances are you have a roommate or two.
Probably, you spend an hour or two at home each night, grading papers and devising ways to make your curriculum meaningful to kids with MTV attention spans.
Then you get up and do it again.
How did it come to be that one of our most important professional jobs is also one of our least desirable?
The chance to sway young lives and minds may be priceless, but it doesn't pay the rent. Yet teachers punch in, day after day, lots of them maintaining the sort of idealism that keeps the rest of us going and gives the rest of us hope.
I don't know how they do it, but I am grateful they do, grateful beyond words. This column is for them.
A teacher tutored my special-needs daughter this summer. She came to the house. They read and wrote and talked. Twice a week, an hour at a time, free of charge. Just because.
Teachers nurture dreams, against big odds. It's time we appreciated that.
Paul Daugherty, an Enquirer sports columnist, writes a lifestyle column on Sunday. He welcomes your comments at 768-8454.
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