It has recently come to my attention that not everyone has been thoroughly educated on how lazy and overpaid teachers are. After all, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. And those who can teach, teach teachers! That second one doesn’t make any sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
The next time that someone tries to tell you that teaching is an incredibly difficult job that only someone who was dedicated to his or her students would do because it’s really fucking hard, please direct them to this handy list so that I can set them straight.
1. Teaching is easy.
I taught public school in Baltimore. Did you know this? I’ve mentioned it only eleventy billion times, so you may have missed it. I chose to teach seventh and eighth graders in Baltimore because it is the easiest job in the land. You may have heard wonderful things about Baltimore. It’s received such excellent publicity these past few years. When I sat in my apartment, planning for the future, I thought, “I am not capable of being a productive member of society, so I shall move to a city with easy students for my cake job teaching middle school. That city is Baltimore.”
Thanks to the rampant disorganization of the school system, my principal did not hire me until the day before school started. Well, I wasn’t exactly hired, more like assigned, since no one else wanted to work at that school (because it is a very easy place to work– excessively easy, even for lazy teachers like me). I had one day to prepare my classroom. This was also very easy, since when I walked in the room, I was given some chalk, an eraser, some desks, and an upside-down teacher’s desk with only three legs.
The second day of school, while lining my students up outside the lunch room– which happened to be next to the second grade classrooms– one of my students began to scream bloody murder for no good reason. It probably lasted a minute, but it felt like for-ev-errrrr. Why was she screaming? No one knew. She screamed like a banshee on meth. How do you stop a young lady who is screaming for no reason and terrorizing the entire second grade? I won’t tell you the answer, because I’m sure you already know. This is an easy problem to solve.
Teaching high-needs students is also easy. Only a quarter or a third of my students were special education students with Individualized Education Plans. And, generally, they were tracked into the same classes. Teaching thirty students, ten or eleven of whom have special needs and accommodations, is very easy to do. Especially when reading levels for your other students– the ones without IEPs– vary from functionally-illiterate to twelfth grade. Planning out lessons for the range of needs of the students in a single classroom is very easy, you see. You just have to make sure that you choose a text that is easy enough for a second grader to read but challenging enough for a high school student so that you don’t leave anyone out. It’s probably easier if you just assign thirty different lessons for thirty different students, but who has time for that when you’re so busy being lazy?
2. Teachers are overpaid for this easy work.
Despite the plethora of supplies that were showered on me when I arrived at the Best School in the Universe, I spent several thousands of dollars buying school supplies. That stapler you just broke? I bought it. That plastic tray for handing in papers that is taped up on one side because it has been broken so many times? I bought it. Pencils, paper, markers, glue, poster paper for projects, that map of the United States? I bought them. The novels that I was supposed to teach per the curriculum but never arrived because the school ran out of money though no one bothered to tell me? I bought those, too. We also did not have a working copy machine. I guess it technically worked, but our principal refused to buy toner cartridges so that we could copy things. She told the PTA that she suspected that the teachers were stealing toner to make copies of their church programs since we were going through the cartridges so quickly. One cartridge for one copier exhausted quickly in a school of one thousand kids? Shocking! It must have been those thieving, lazy, overpaid teachers.
So the copies of that exam on US history? I paid for those at Kinkos. And the texts I assigned when I taught seventh grade social studies? I paid for those, too, since there was no textbook for the class. Who designs a curriculum around a textbook that doesn’t exist? People who want to make teachers’ jobs easier, that’s who.
But that’s okay. I could afford to spend $3000 a year on school supplies when I was paid embarrassingly well for such little work. I made $40,000 a year before taxes. After my weekly trip to Staples, I’d roll a big fat one with one of the many hundreds left in my wallet.
3. Teachers only work, like, six hours a day.
This is totally true, as long as you don’t count the hour I spent preparing before the school doors opened and children bum-rushed me, the two to three hours I spent grading, monitoring detention, coaching quiz bowl, helping students with assignments, and cleaning up after school ended. Or the hours I spent lesson planning and grading on the weekends. But is that all really work? Grading is really fun, especially when you are teaching 120 students two separate classes every day. So if students complete one assignment for each class per day, you’re grading at least 240 assignments a day. That’s 1,200 assignments per week, minimum. It is very easy to get this done while you are teaching, so long as you have a clone of yourself or perhaps a small child you keep locked in a closet with a bowl of gruel and an endless supply of red pens.
4. Teaching is for the weak.
Teachers are pansy-ass weaklings. Only once did I have to throw myself over a student to prevent him from having his head stomped during a particularly vicious fight. Only twice was I myself hit by students. Only many, many times did I have to break up fights, often between students who were bigger and heavier than me.
5. Teachers are stupid.
When I received straight As in organic chemistry for three quarters in undergrad, I said to myself, “This is not a product of my hard work and willingness to take two years of chemistry in high school, or a sign of a talent for this particular subject, or a promising part of an application for medical school. This is a sign of my stupidity and lack of intelligence.” So I chose teaching, because I figured it would be a very easy and convenient way to mask the fact that I am just not very smart and had no other options in life.
6. Teachers are drunks.
Well… yes.
