glee loves teachers

“Thank you to public school teachers.

You do the most important work in America even though you don’t get paid like it.”

~GLEE writer Ian Brennan

I believed it before I joined the profession – teachers are some of the most noble, selfless people around. Sure, you get two months off each summer (or five weeks if you work at KIPP) but you are paid very little when you break it down to an hourly basis. You have to be smart, but no one thinks you intellectual. You have to be patient, and kind, and flexible, and a good communicator, and a great listener, and able to make multiple decisions in excruciatingly short time frames.

If you’re a new teacher at a school that pushes your students to achieve, achieve, achieve (and I think that’s a great thing) you stay up late some nights finding a way to introduce fractions in an interesting way, or explain what exactly the difference is between okay sentence structure and exemplary student writing.

No one pats you on the back often enough, your paycheck doesn’t take into account the pencils and hand sanitizer and books you just bought and the science experiment materials you’ll buy tomorrow, some families think you rock and others think you’re horrible, some students forget you’re a human with a life outside the school, other students pry and want to know all details of your life outside the school walls.

I believed it before I joined the profession – teachers are the most underappreciated group of employees in the nation. But now that I am one, and I’m in the building for a minimum of 10.5 hours each day but usually 11 or 12, I am baffled at the fact that lawyers and wall street brokers and bankers and all sorts of other people – important, essential people to be sure- get recruited and wined and dined while teachers are hardly ever “recruited.” They are expected to join education out of the goodness of their heart. This is a fine reason, but still, baffles me that education recruitment is so nonexistent.

Anyways, this quote from the Glee writer is a nice shout out to teachers all over the country. And, hey, people in the financial world or wherever, making more money than teachers, don’t get to confiscate notes like this at their jobs:

“Yes but I want to be more than friends like I want to hang out together or talk to each other. Do you want to do that? YES or NO”

Yep, one of my 8 year old girls wrote that for an 8 year old boy from another class. But, she has good taste - he gells his hair into a Mohawk everyday and is really nice. However, in the 3rd grade world where I’m in charge, we’re all friends and nothing more than that. Because we are EIGHT years old. And I'm really busy trying to figure out to teach math to handle awkward situations like if he were to circle "no."