Who's Hot for Teacher?

Teaching is NOTHING like this.

It ought to be Teacher Appreciation week every week, but as it now stands, it's this week, May 6th through 10th!  That said, I'll state the obvious.  Teachers make ridiculously low wages.  I speak from experience.  I taught middle and high school for eight years.  I passed all those national and state tests, and I had my master's degree in my specialty area.   My husband, who has a bachelor's degree and works in the corporate world, kept getting pay raises.  I did not.


What did I get?  
1.  Less autonomy.  I had to have my lesson plans approved.  
2.  Less creative input.  I eventually memorized every eighth grade standard of learning because I was required to write it on the board with the day's "schedule."  
3.  A time clock.  Punch in and punch out.  
4.  Teacher work days, days I needed to grade, but was required to

Can you imagine teaching in heels?

attend seminars that had nothing to do with my job.  
5.  Distrust from my superiors, who would take a child's word over mine, and who would make me keep a child who was disrupting my class right there in the classroom with the rest of my students.  
6.  Longer school calendars for the same pay.
7.  The expectation that I should work LONG after the school day had ended.
8.  A growing wage gap between myself and my peers.
9.  More tests to administer.  More accountability.  Less input.
10.  Burned out.  I left teaching to pursue my dream of writing.

This is what we want.

When I first went back to school to get my MFA in creative writing, I remember taking night classes and grading my students' essays on my fifteen minute break during my 7 to 9:40 class.  I was never without a stack of papers in my hands.  I graded papers on weekends.  I remember one weekend, laying on the beach in Nags Head and a gust of wind blew my students' papers across the sand.  I scurried after them.  Fortunately, so did the other folks on the

beach.  We gathered up the moist sandy pages.  If it were a work of fiction, I might toss them to the wind.  I don't know, but as it was, I worried about how those stapled sheets of paper looked and how I'd explain handing them back in that condition.  "Ms. Young has a life outside of school?"  They'd be confused.  

I couldn't buy beer or wine at the grocery store without getting odd

looks.  I was a teacher.  I was held to a higher moral code but once again, paid a pittance for my efforts.  

I LOVED my students.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have lasted as long as I did.  

Teachers are college-educated state and private employees who spend the greater part of their days with our children.  And you know, as well as I do, our children are wonderful and special, and our teachers, whose classrooms are too crowded and who are underpaid, who have to deal on a daily basis with discipline issues and oftentimes stressed parents, need a little love.

Yes, they only have this one week, and NO, it's not enough... so, as this year winds to a close, do something thoughtful and kind for your child's teacher or for a teacher friend.  

Say THANK YOU.    

Brew Pub Recommendation

The Brewing Station, mp 8.5 just past the Wright Brother's Memorial on the sound side of the Bypass.  Not only is the beer brewed on site, but the brewery is the east coast's first wind-powered brewery!  The Pub has been featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, AND the building is a work-of-art.  Make sure to look up when you get inside, and check out the pirate ship in the enclosed outside area, complete with corn hole and stage.  This is a local and tourists' favorite.  You will DEFINITELY be back for more..