On, Wisconsin! (or, In Defense of Teachers)

I promise this will be the only somewhat political thing I will write in this blog. If you're a fan of Scott Walker, or you think teachers are lazy bums gorging themselves at the public teat, then don't read this. Or do read this, but try to do so with an open mind. I'm a teacher, but this is not about me. My teaching has been at the high school and college level. Nancy, on the other hand, is an elementary school teacher, with 24 years of teaching before she retired. Elementary teachers are the real heroes of education. Yes her official school day started at 8:40 AM and ended at 3:15 PM, but that was only a fraction of her workday. She typically got to school around 7:30 AM to prepare for the day's lessons - setting up her room for learning activities, contacting parents, collaborating with colleagues, and so on. And she rarely left school before 4:30 or 5 PM. And, of course, she wasn't alone. Take a ride past your local elementary school at 5 or 5:30 PM and notice the cars in the parking lot. Those are teachers' cars, the teachers being in their classrooms evaluating the day's lessons, preparing for the next day's lessons, or in the teachers' room running off handouts for the next day. And what do they do when they get home? Well, Nancy would sit down and work on lesson plans (she had at least six different subjects to prepare each day), grade papers, prepare quizzes and/or tests, design and build special projects, etc. This would go on, typically, from the time she got home until 8 or 9 at night, with time off to cook and eat dinner and maybe do some other chores - while being the mother of school-age children for most of those years. Why all this preparation? Is she just a fanatic? Well, try to imagine having 20 or more 10-year-olds (or 7-year-olds, or pick your favorite elementary age) in your room, with the job of teaching them concepts of mathematics or social studies or reading or science or writing. If you're a parent, think of having your kids and another 15 or 20 of their friends in your house for most of the day and keeping them interested as you try to teach them new ideas and skills. Try that for 180 days a year, with a big test at the end, which will supposedly measure your competence, and whether you should be retained or fired. (This is another topic  altogether. I'll just throw in an analogy here: let's see who's the better race driver, you or me. I'll drive a Ferrari and you get a Ford Pinto - remember those? - and we'll have a race. Winner gets to keep his job, loser gets fired. Kind of like comparing test performance of poor, often underfed and perhaps under-parented inner-city students with students from nice middle or upper-middle class communities, like Lenox, and using that as a basis for evaluating teachers.) Scott Walker isn't interested in solving his budget problems. If he was, he wouldn't have started his reign by giving huge tax breaks to his rich and corporate sponsors. He wants to break the public sector unions, the teacher unions being the most prominent. Even with unions. teachers, and other public sector workers, make less, for comparable qualifications, than private sector workers (remember that public school teachers must have at least a bachelor's degree, and in most states a master's degree). A look around the world will show that the countries with the highest achieving students treat teaching as a respected profession and pay teachers accordingly. So congratulations to all the pro-union protesters in Wisconsin (and Ohio and Indiana) and a pox on arrogant, obfuscating Scott Walker and his ilk in other states.

If you've made it this far, an update. It was back to Boston yesterday for a follow-up, the usual blood-letting and meeting with Jason, our NP. My numbers were all good, even better than last time. I feel pretty good, after having a slight fever Thursday and kind of crashing after getting home yesterday (we walked to the MFA after the hospital - about a mile each way - and spent a couple of hours with the exhibits before heading home).  We're looking forward to getting home to Lenox next week.