Those Who Can: Why I Want My Students to Become Teachers
The following is a speech I delivered at Writers’ Week in March 2022.
A lawyer, a politician, and a teacher die and go to heaven. “To get in,” says St. Peter, “each of you must answer a question.” To the lawyer, he says, “What boat sank in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg?” “The Titanic!” yells the lawyer. “Good,” said St. Peter. To the politician, he says, “How many died on that boat?” The politician knows this one. “1,228!” he said. “Excellent,” said St. Peter. He turns to the teacher. “Name them.”
Maybe you’ve heard that one before. I’ve got a few more that might interest you. Why don’t leeches feed on teachers? Professional courtesy. A teacher, a torturer, and a bum walk into a bar. Bartender says, “What can I get you Mr. Rossi?” How many teachers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: teachers don’t change lightbulbs, but if they assign enough homework they convince themselves it’s a little brighter.
Ah, see… you’re a good audience… you didn’t laugh too hard at the teacher jokes. You respect teachers, right? Say thank you when the bell rings. Bring them Frango Mints at Christmas time. Maybe write them a little note at the end of the year. We keep those; they’re nice. Not Target-gift-card nice, but you know… better than the mints.
But if I’m being real with you — and this is the part of the speech where a 15-year-old in Air Force Ones would say “yo, deadass” — I don’t think teachers are deeply respected. And here’s how I know: very few of my students will go on to become teachers themselves.
I get it. If I was forced to go to the circus every day for twelve years, I’m not sure I’d be eager to become a clown. It’s just a shame because many of you would be excellent clowns. You’re smart, good communicators, creative. You handle stress well. You like working with people. You want to make a difference with your life. You want your career to matter, to be more than a number.
Well, here’re some numbers for you. In the past decade we’ve gone from having a surplus of new teacher graduates to a national deficit of more than 100,000. In other words, there are more teaching jobs available than new teachers to fill them, and each year that gap is getting bigger. Registration in teaching colleges is down — the programs that produced Mr. Wingate, for instance, have closed due to low enrollment. Teachers are burning out, too. According to a recent survey, 48% of teachers admitted that they had considered quitting within the last 30 days. Of that number 34% said they were thinking about leaving the profession entirely. Teachers are not always good at hiding stress — it’s not unusual to spot one of us yelling at a piece of chalk. If I’m a kid in class, why would I look at someone sobbing over the unit circle and say, “Mmm, yeah… break me off 35 more years of that.”
But it goes deeper. Let me see a show of hands — how many of you have had primarily white teachers like me throughout your education? And how many of those white teachers have mispronounced your name or made an ignorant remark — unintentionally, of course — about your culture? I’m sure you’re too polite to call us out most of the time, but the truth is we need a younger workforce and we need a more diverse workforce. But when I approach my most promising students of color and ask them if they would ever consider teaching, what I often hear is that their families tell them not to pursue it. Teaching is too little prestige for too little money. Teaching is good enough for someone like me but not for my students. That hurts more than the jokes. So much more. Though the Frango mints help.
I’m not here for the pity, though. Or to guilt y’all. I’m here because I want you all to know that teaching IS prestigious. And lucrative. And fulfilling. I’m here because I want you all to become teachers.
So let’s start with the Naperville part: the money. It’s true that teachers make less than other professions with a comparable education and experience, by some estimates as much as 20%. It varies from state to state; in Mississippi, for instance, a new teacher is going to earn below the family standard of living. Illinois is ranked tenth nationally; here, the average teacher makes $67,000 a year, about two grand less than a truck driver and ten grand less than a dental hygienist. In my 18th year of teaching with two master’s degrees, I make $97,554, which I don’t mind telling you because all teachers’ salaries are public record. Teacher salaries are funded by taxes, and raising taxes is not any politician’s idea of a good campaign promise, so we’re not talking about an industry that promises a lot of growth.
But it is an industry that will offer stability and long-term care. What your parents probably don’t focus on when they’re circling the salary in red ink is teaching’s job security. Remember that shortage I mentioned? School districts are motivated to train and retain the new teachers they do hire. A teacher in this district, for instance, who earns a proficient rating four years in a row can be granted tenure, which means that you cannot be fired without cause. You want to know how I know they can’t give my job to a call-center on the other side of the globe? Because we tried it last year, and it was like breathing in farts through a straw for four hours a day. Do your job well, and you can expect that job for as long as you want.
The other thing they don’t explain to you — because it’s harder to explain — are teacher pensions. Decades ago, everyone understood that a public financing model meant districts couldn’t offer competitive salaries, so a defined benefit system was developed which guarantees retirees a lifetime payment stream based on their years of service and the salary they received near the end of their career. If I average 100k a year for the last seven years of my career, then starting at age 67 I can expect to earn four-fifths of that every year for the rest of my life, with adjustments for inflation. “Sixty-seven?” you say. “I’m working until I’m 67?” Yeah, kid, that is a bum deal. Good thing it’s the only thing that sucks about capitalism.
So let’s talk about prestige, the other reason why people avoid teaching. It’s overrated. Unlike salary, prestige isn’t real — it’s an idea that people have about something. It’s the reason why Supreme can charge you $300 for an ugly, uncomfortable hoodie made mostly of recycled fishing nets. Do you know what was prestigious for hundreds of years in the European nobility? Inbreeding.
But just because prestige isn’t real doesn’t mean that it’s not real. We’re affected by prestige all the time. I teach AP English, the “smartest,” “hardest working” students in the school. They would crawl through three miles of clogged sewer line if I made it extra credit. I’m not kidding — they’d do it. Why? So that they can get the weighted A, which means they can inflate their GPA in hopes of cracking open the admissions window of some fancy-pants college where they’ll enjoy the privilege of taking out hundreds of thousands in debt just so they can say they went there. It’s more than bragging rights, of course; prestigious colleges can offer connections or internships or opportunities. But so can LinkedIn.
Prestige is an illusion; it will never fill you up; it’s being excited to go to a party only to get there and realize it’s just a boring room where a bunch of boring people are having boring conversations. Remember when you were eight and excited to be a teenager, only to turn fourteen and realize that it’s pimples and cringe and homework and cringe and Friday nights feeling like a loser and cringe and cringe and OhGodI’mSoTiredIJustWantaNap. But hey — maybe it’ll be different when you’re fifteen.
In economics, Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to become a good measure. That’s a fancy way of saying that if you’re defining yourself based on a particular outcome, you’re setting yourself up for emptiness and fraud. Take those A students I mentioned. They can earn an A by hard work, discipline, and good study habits. But when you multiply that by six other classes, add in extracurriculars, and multiply by a factor of adolescence, all of a sudden you’re dealing with an unsolvable equation. So my students start to take shortcuts. Instead of doing their own work, they pool resources on GroupChat. Instead of doing the reading, they Sparknote it and hope that I don’t call on them. I’m not judging this — I figured out the same thing twenty-five years ago: it’s easier to resemble the A than to be the A. And if the results are the same, then who cares if I cheated?
As it turns out, you should care. When bad police want to show they’re more effective, they reclassify crimes. When a bad hospital wants to improve their clearance rate, they stop admitting really sick patients. And when an engineer gets a degree after sixteen years of taking academic shortcuts, he’s created a permission structure to design crappy bridges. Prestige’s greatest trick is to get us to think it’s the same thing as merit. It’s not. You don’t make yourself smart just by going to Harvard anymore than I make myself sexy by putting on a Gucci belt buckle.
Excellence is what you want. Excellence is an intrinsic reward. Prestige is easy to understand — it’s a Louis Vuitton handbag — but excellence is really only appreciated by other excellence. I work with many excellent teachers. Mrs. Schneider can make a classful of coma patients hammer out poetry that would make Putin cry. With nothing more than a raised eyebrow, Mr. Janota can get a kid to recite Shakespeare in perfect pentameter. Dr. Hobbs’ classes dredge up meaning in a poem like they’re raising the Titanic; Mrs. Van Milligen can turn a grammar lesson into a 1980s karaoke jam. Mr. Pontarelli makes the quiet kid loud; Ms. LaScola inspires the introverts to lead. Ms. Jakubas can put a book in your hand so that it functions like a telescope, microscope, or mirror. They’re playing five games of chess a day, and they remember the position of every piece on the boards. Where other professions watch the clock, the teachers I know end class saying, “Dang it, if only I had five more minutes.” I didn’t know what true excellence was until I worked around excellent teachers, and teaching is more inclined to produce excellence than medicine because after a doctor writes a prescription she’s out of your life, but a teacher sits with you and cares for you for nine months. We do, you know. Care for you. God help us.
And that, my friends, is the real reason you need to become teachers. There is no other profession that so inspires you to become a part of something. A corporation can fire you; the army can blow you up. A school, on the other hand, is a living, breathing community formed by the contributions of its members. It’s not quite family, but it’s more than just a place to work. I’m proud of this place, proud to be associated with it. I like walking past the choir room and hearing Mr. Remington’s students harmonize. I love that Mr. Javaharian’s classes always make t-shirts, that Ms. Sammit regularly displays her students’ artwork, that at any period of the day I could enter the aux gym and see world-class pickleball being played by laughing students. Do you know Mr. Brauer? I think he’s literally an angel, a real-life catcher in the rye. There are people alive today simply because he was their teacher, but I don’t think he would disagree with the statement that he is alive because they were his students. The truth is that it’s not the teacher who holds the classroom together; it’s the classroom that holds together the teacher. In life, you have to belong to something bigger than yourself. If you’re lucky, that thing will be a force of good. But if you’re smart, that thing will have your name on a syllabus and a door.
I’m here today because a key moment of my life, a teacher grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and told me she expected more of me, that I was wasting my junior year with foolishness. I didn’t know that was going to be the day that changed my life. But I also didn’t know until I was a teacher that in saving me, Mrs. Kane also saved herself.
I have one more joke for you. A young man takes a job at age 24. He works with 152 kids. Learns their names, their handwriting, their joys and sorrows. Drags them by the scruff of their necks to better reading and writing. A year later, he gets another 150. The next year, 150 more. Again, again. A decade, a quarter century. Thousands of essays, millions of pencil shavings. Hours spent before sunrise, through the gloom of night, years on years until his eyes blur and his posture stoops. The bell rings. Time to go. “Dang it,” he says. “If only I had five more minutes.”
