2 posts tagged “teaching”

This started out as a reply to Holly’s comment on my previous post and grew from there (Holly, I appreciate the comments.  As I'm sure y'all know by now, I love a good difference of opinion)...

Does money matter when it comes to teaching?

The highest-paid profession in the US, according to Forbes, is anesthesiology, with a mean salary of $184,000.  To become an anesthesiologist requires 12 years of specialized training, including an undergraduate major in pre-med (or a hard science), admission to medical school, three years of medical school, and a one-year residency.  Along the way, the future anesthesiologist must pass the MCAT and become board certified (by comparison, 9% of teachers in Mississippi are board-certified, which ranks us 3rd in the nation).  Each one of these steps is a highly competitive process.  The bar is set incredibly high.  Yet, there is no shortage of anesthesiologists in this country.  To become a certified teacher, in Mississippi, requires a four-year degree in any subject from any college in the country with a minimum GPA of 2.5, passing scores on the Praxis I and II (about the easiest standardized test on the planet), and completion of an eight-week online program from Teach Mississippi Institute (or three weeks with “Alternate Pathways”).  The bar is set incredibly low.  Yet, we have a huge shortage.  And a mean salary of $40,000.

Do you have to be motivated by altruism to be a good teacher?

I am completely uninterested in a person's motivation to become a teacher.  If someone is a good teacher, who cares why he or she became a teacher?  If we pay teachers a million dollars a year, and people become teachers primarily for the money, and they are good at it, great.  Put another way, if you have to love the profession of teaching to be a great teacher, why should we pay teachers anything?

If the first-year teaching salary was a million dollars, the teacher shortage would end tomorrow.  Over five years, tens of thousands of low-performing teachers would be flushed from the profession by the influx of good teachers.  Teacher-training programs would become competitive and could raise standards rather than being a cash-cow for the universities.  Low-performing education majors would be washed out because there would no longer be pressure to turn out certified teachers to address the teacher shortage...

I often tell the first-years that when it comes to classroom management you will have three or four students in each class that will behave no matter what, three or four that will act up no matter what, and everyone else is in the middle and can go either way.  In listening to this great interview with Ed Burns, co-creator of The Wire (David Simon once described Burns, a former soldier in Vietnam, police detective in the Western District of Baltimore, and teacher in inner-city Baltimore, as a veteran of three failed wars: Vietnam, drugs, poverty), I realized that not only is this true for the classroom, it is true for the teaching profession in general.  Some teachers will give their all no matter what, some will do as little as possible no matter what, and the majority will do only what is required.  And this is not only true for teachers, it is true for every profession.  Burns talks about his success as a detective by describing a bell curve: 

You know, in any profession you have the old bell curve.  Most of the people just want to do the job and they will tend to the job, and then a group of people on one end who will actually hurt the job, use the job, and then there is another group that are enamored of the job and are dedicated.  And I sort of think that I am one of the people that really gets involved with something I do.  I don't think I am an anamoly.  The thing about human beings is, there is another animal we most closely resemble and that is the mole... We love to get down in a rut and stay there and like the mole we become blind because we are not looking around.  We turn off the one thing that makes us different than the mole, we turn off our brains.  We just do things.  And in the doing them it becomes, we have a comfort and as long as we are in that comfort zone we are happy, or maybe just content.  But we, we are very reluctant to push out... Change petrifies people...