My doctor says teaching English will kill me

My doctor recently told me that if I don’t find a new job, I’m probably going to die.

I’m not an underwater welder or a police officer or a firefighter. I teach middle-school English, and until my latest blood pressure test at my semi-annual physical, I never thought of doing anything else.

I am 37 years old. I don’t eat fast food. I don’t smoke. I rarely drink. I’m 6 feet tall and weigh 180 pounds. I start every day with a fresh fruit smoothie. I run a sub-two hour halfmarathon and have a resting heart rate in the low 50s. I have no other physical ailments. I don’t take medications that can negatively affect my cardiovascular system.

Yet I have the blood pressure of a man who eats bratwursts like they were broccoli.

Hypertension has me feeling like I’m on the verge of death. As soon as the day is over, my mind races with the anticipation of the next: 156 papers to grade for 156 students with 156 unique learning strengths and characteristics. And I need to think of how to meet and challenge them all.

But the scholastic challenges pale in comparison to the emotional ones. The older I get, the more I see the pain in the kids’ eyes. I wonder when the last time someone told them they were good at something or that they are loved. I try my best to remember this when I’m breaking up fights in the hallway. Or when parents lay their shortcomings at our feet.

I, like most public educators, take the blame. And it becomes physical.

I can feel it in my chest, like a small toddler is sitting on top of my heart. It feels sharp. Sometimes the pain goes deep. Over the years, I learned to deal with it. I chalked it up to another elevated symptom of my combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

When you’re a combat veteran, it becomes easy to blame everything on war. But, sometimes, the world outside of war can be every bit as dreadful.

In addition to teaching, I write, not just as a hobby but now as a vocation. If I didn’t write, one way or another, I would have already died. Of this I am sure.

The overwhelming majority of my educator colleagues have no such outlet. For most, teaching is their life — not out of necessity, but by very deliberate choice.

Teaching is one of the few professions that require a college degree for every level of work. To progress, a master’s degree is almost a requirement. All public school teachers are required to hold a bachelor’s degree and pass a subject matter competency test. According to the Legislative Analysis Office 42% of public school teachers hold a master’s degree or higher.

Teachers are among the most educated and trained group of people in any workforce, yet the salaries are not at all comparable to that level of education.

According to the Oakland Unified School District salary schedule, a firstyear teacher in what is the largest school district in the East Bay can expect to earn $51,905.14. Because the educational thresholds to work in our profession, most of us have student loans — a burden not carried by many other public servants, most of whom receive much higher pay than teachers.

According to the city of Oakland, a police recruit — not an officer, but a recruit still in the police academy in Oakland — starts at $69,327.72 annually and receives an immediate raise upon graduation from the police academy.

Officers are not even required to hold a high school diploma; a general equivalency diploma will get you in the door.

And then there’s the stress. And the depression. Teachers are more likely to be depressed than other adults, according to a Rand Corp. survey.

Interestingly, even though teachers suffer from depression at high rates, we are not in the top 10 for suicide rates.

So what’s keeping us alive?

A sense of duty perhaps. Knowing that however underappreciated we may be, our presence is the only thing keeping some children safe for seven hours of the day. Knowing that however taxing and dangerous to our own mental and physical health this work is, we have to keep getting in front of that class each day. We have to look at all those faces and imagine each one of them turning into the people we all know they can be someday.

If, as Plato wrote, an educated populace is indeed the cornerstone to a well-functioning democracy, we need to start treating the disseminators of that valuable education with the dignity and compensation they earn each and every day.

I want to keep teaching. I want to stay in public education. But I have to think about what my doctor said. I feel the blood rushing through my veins with the pressure of a backed up fire hose. I feel my heart beat, hard yet nonrhythmic. I sweat when I’m cold and my extremities are there only by memory.

I want to keep teaching, but I don’t want to drop dead with a dry-erase marker in my hand.