Why I Didn't Become a Teacher

A number of years ago, when my own career was nicely living up to its lack of promise for the future, I began to explore alternative options. The 1990s Economic Boom hadn't yet happened, at least not to those of us who worked in offices and were told by our Leona Helmsley wannabe supervisors, "Now, now, the eighties are over, you can't expect the plush deal you had before." Teaching certainly seemed a safe, solid, steady profession. I thought I'd check it out. This meant Back to School, but I had recently hit thirty and was in the mood to feel a bit younger.

Many non-teachers have the wild idea that a teacher's day is the student's day, or at least what the student's day was when they were students: in the classroom at nine, recess, lunch hour, bell at three, a half page of arithmetic problems for homework, and then you've got the rest of the day to yourself. In fact, given the popular opinion that teaching is a kickback job with decent pay and long vacations, it's amazing that more people don't abandon their own drudgery and leap aboard the education bandwagon.

In reality, teaching, like the military, has a long tradition of being the job you got because you couldn't get anything else. Up until well into the twentieth century, a schoolteacher was little more than an indentured government servant, living in a rented room and expected to perform community service: play the organ at church, say, or organize committees for whatever. The pay was almost nonexistent; though, for many women, teaching was a way to support themselves until they got married. Married women were not allowed to teach, giving rise to the Old Maid Schoolteacher mystique. Male teachers were rare, and usually of the Ichabod Crane variety: pale, skinny, spinsterish wimps you see in the Norman Rockwell portraits flogging kids with hickory sticks. Unionization vastly improved the teachers' lot but not their reputation.

Requirements vary from state to state: in California, to teach in elementary school, you have to pass both the CBEST (California Basic Education Skills Test) and the MSAT (Multiple Subject Assessment Test), and pay to take them too! CBEST isn't bad, but MSAT is a grueling eight-hour essay-writing session. Only then are you allowed to take your "Methods" classes, where, among other things, you learn what a lesson plan is. Teaching is not arbitrary, nor is it a simple matter of following books; lesson plans for every hour of class time must be worked out weekly, and on your own time, and submitted to the principal in advance. There is also "field work": classroom observation you schedule, again on your own time, at whatever school you find to accommodate you.

After Methods, you do a year of Student Teaching in a classroom with a mentor teacher, before you're allowed to solo. Being alone with your first class has got to be terrifying. I don't know because I didn't make it that far. By mid-Methods, I had caught on that this was to be a 60-hour week minimum. Most classroom supplies--manipulatives in teacher lingo--are paid for out of the teacher's pocket. (Here the public frequently scoffs: "Oh, boo hoo! How much does a little construction paper cost?" Actually, even non-computer-related classroom supplies can eat up a good third of the teacher's income.) The long vacations sound lovely, except that much of them are spent either taking classes--to brush up on skills needed for the ever-changing education environment--or teaching them, and preparing for the oncoming school year.

How I would have done with the kids is a moot point; I began to envision fistfights with the parents. "If you want your children's grades to improve, why don't you sit down with them and help them with their schoolwork?" "I don't have time" is the invariable answer. Every parent in North America, it seems, works 12-hour days and has a two-hour each-way commute. Yet somehow, as you find out from their workplace conversation, they manage to be up on all the latest movies and TV shows, rehashing last night's episode of "CSI Wherever" as if they'd written it.

Too, conservative parents don't want their children exposed to books like Heather Has Two Mommies and Isn't Thrown By It Because Kids Are A Lot More Resilient Than They're Given Credit For and Haven't Yet Learned That Bigotry Is The Real Lifestyle Choice, or titles to that effect. Some liberal parents evidently go bananas if the word "Christmas" is uttered in class. Teachers, caught in the middle, learn fast that they must be flexible to a degree that would make Gumby envious. To this end, I have no point of personal reference, as I'd attended a Catholic elementary school, where separation of church and state was a mere rumor.

At any rate, around this time, test scores in many school districts began dropping; this is when we began to hear public schools referred to as failing public schools. The "voucher" controversy (whether to use taxpayer funds to allow parents to send their kids to private and/or religious schools, meaning even less money for public schools hit by Reagan-era budget cuts) came up, as did several teachers' strikes. Finally I decided that, politically, it simply wasn't worth it. But I don't regret the experience, or the couple of thou it cost me, for a minute.

Maybe later, when I'm a grownup, I'll take up where I left off. Maybe not. I don't really like being called Mr. Dawson; people only do so when they're mad at me.