Penance and paychecks, teachers and summer

Poor Elijah was sipping his second cup of coffee when his buddy on the next stool offered to give him a hand.

“With what?” Poor Elijah inquired.

“With your wallet,” his chum replied. “What with your summer check and all, I figured you might need help lifting it.”

Never mind that his summer check covers time he’s already put in during the school term that his district just doesn’t pay him for until June. Poor Elijah is a teacher, which means he works three-hour days. He also gets six months off for summer and a month off every other week for legal holidays.

He’s tried doing penance. He’s dropped for 50 pushups on the coffee shop floor, forfeited his turn reading the house newspaper, and offered to run headlong into a bread truck. Nothing helps.

“It’s a wonder you can sleep at night,” they marvel. “Can teachers go to heaven?”

Once, he did the arithmetic for them on the specials board. Take the 188 days required by his contract and multiply by eight hours. Yes, technically he could slip out some days after only seven and a half, and he does get lunch, even though many teachers use their lunch minutes to catch up on loose ends. After you factor in planning, photocopying, setting things up in the morning, and packing things up in the afternoon, plus meetings and parent conferences, you’re easily well over eight hours.

Then there’s all that quality time at home correcting tests, essays and projects. Add another eight hours a week, with the understanding that many teachers will howl that he’s underestimating. This brings the teacher total to 224 eight-hour days.

Now let’s tally Poor Elijah’s time card when he worked on a receiving dock in the real world. Start with 365 days in a year. Next subtract 104 days for weekends, 20 days for the four weeks of paid vacation he’d earned after five years, and six more for the standard holidays like Christmas and the Fourth of July. You’re left with 230 workdays.

Throw in a fascinating summer course in cross-curriculum reading methods or contemporary trends in rubric-scored assessment, and we’re just about even.

Feeling sorry for him yet?

Me, either. He knew what he was getting into.

So did I. Well, actually, no, I didn’t. But what I didn’t know had nothing to do with my paycheck. I also don’t deny that I enjoy summer break, although that’s not why I support it. I believe in giving students the summer off because it’s good for them.

In fairness, teachers historically were underpaid. Back in 1968, the starting teacher’s salary in my comfortable, middleclass town was $5,200. Meanwhile, I was earning $80 a week at my summer job as a hospital orderly. That was only $1,000 less a year than my English teacher.

Teachers’ wages still lag behind other professions, but salaries have improved markedly since I was a student. In part, this is due to teachers unions. Before you get the wrong idea, Poor Elijah is far from an enthusiastic member of the rank and file. He’s content with what he gets paid, and only joined for the liability insurance in case somebody’s mother decided to sue him for giving her darling a C or a detention. He also strenuously disagrees with his union on most education issues. As far as he’s concerned, the NEA should leave all the “what’s good for kids” education stuff to teachers, parents and communities, and confine itself to the proper business of a labor union: money and working conditions.

Critics clamor for higherquality teachers. It’s true that some of us are mediocre at our craft, just as there are plenty of mediocre lawyers, mechanics and carpenters. In addition, the theory and training bandwagons promoted by workshop experts more often distract and mislead teachers in their daily efforts to improve in their actual classrooms with actual students. In any case, once you weed us mediocrities out, you’ll need to come up with higher-quality candidates to replace us.

Retirement and escalating enrollment over the next few years will create a substantial demand for new teachers. Some politicians and policymakers have proposed attracting new recruits by declaring teaching “an act of patriotism” and a “prestige” profession. Of course, despite the fact that many of us enter the classroom knowing we won’t get rich, many otherwise qualified Americans don’t necessarily feel the same way.

People go into teaching for all sorts of reasons, everything from summers off and an infatuation with the sound of our own voices to a genuine devotion to children and a moral obligation to pass on what we know to the next generation.

What communities pay teachers is a legitimate budgetary concern. Constraining labor costs wouldn’t hurt when it comes to tax rates, and higher salaries wouldn’t hurt when it comes to recruiting talented candidates. Either way, though, money is far from the principal reason most teachers decide to hang up their chalk. It’s also not the reason our schools are in trouble.

Until we’re ready to take an honest look at what’s wrong with our schools, our expectations, and ourselves, Poor Elijah has a proposition.

He won’t complain that he doesn’t make as much as the average investment banker.

All he asks is a few guiltfree minutes to drink his summer coffee.