A Little More Appreciation, Please – It’s Needed Now More Than Ever
I had a whole other blog ready for today before I woke up to the fact that this is Teacher Appreciation Week, and if that’s not something we need to talk about, I don’t know what is.
As many of you know, I have the distinct pleasure and privilege to teach alongside an amazing group of teachers. They are dedicated, caring, and highly intelligent. They want the very best for each of their students and they spend hours helping them reach higher goals and find their better selves. So, if you know Mollie Kinard, Deiha Torin, Alicia Brown, Claudia Beard, Tiffany Hathaway, LouAnne Barrett, Melvin Small, Whitney Rolf, or Richard Sanders, please tell them how very much they are appreciated.
Having said all that, I think it is immensely important that we also talk about our country’s not-so-appreciated teachers. Those would be the ones in many of our nation’s public schools. We all know that a majority of the students in the United States attend public school and we also know that right now many of those schools are struggling for several reasons. Many are underfunded which means their classrooms are overcrowded. Thousands of teachers are leaving or have left their profession and don’t seem to be coming back. That means that the remaining teachers are “covering” classes they weren’t hired for. Standardized tests are the measuring stick not only for what a student might have learned but, in many cases, sets the bar for whether the teacher gets a raise or even keeps his job next year. Add to that, because of the curricula and approaches prevalent in traditional educational settings, teachers are limited in how they can even present and assess academic content. Sadly, in some cases, teachers are being told by non-educators what topics are not up for discussion inside their classrooms.
In addition, many of them “don’t really have the summers off” because that’s when they work to supplement their incomes. (The average starting salary for teachers in the United States is somewhere between $39,000 and $52,000.) Many teachers have second jobs during the school year also. Add that to the papers they grade, the lesson plans they prepare for approval before they can teach the unit, and the 25 or more children – all needing some kind of differentiated approach to learning – and you have, to say the least, a stressful situation. Nonetheless, thousands of teachers show up each day to do their best in less-than-ideal circumstances. I wish I had a magic wand and could make class sizes smaller for them, give them more autonomy in how they teach, and help their students’ parents see all the work they do. More than that, I wish I could help people see that teachers are professionals, that their expertise shows itself in the intellectual and emotional health of our children, much the way doctors care for their physical well-being.
So, this one week a year set aside for thinking about all that our country’s teachers do for us, maybe we can show them a little more appreciation. I imagine they could use it – now more than ever.
What do you think?
