Do you respect teachers?

I’m sitting in a public library next to a man who smells like alcohol and homelessness, you know the smell.

I think a lot about poverty when I look out into the crumbling streets while on bus 72 from Newark to Bloomfield. I think about how crazy it is that people live the way they do and how difficult for this cycle to be broken. Read this comic before moving on.

The only thing I see as a possible solution is to improve education. Education is what differentiates people in varying economic statuses. It is with education that people can better compete for jobs. Sure other types of discrimination can limit a person but in general, these things are getting better. The fact is that a job goes to someone who is qualified and no employer is going to hire people who are unqualified. That is simple economics. The more that people understand Math, English, and Science, the better they are at making inferences about the world. The world opens up when you have more information. We don’t need studies and statistics to come to that conclusion, it’s obvious.

I think that in order to reform education in poorer areas, we need to increase pay to teachers in those areas. Teachers are not all saints, putting time and energy into their work like that teacher from the Freedom Writers movie. Teachers are like everyone else, people who are influenced by money. If we can make the pay for teachers so utterly attractive, people will apply, and good ones at that. I have a few friends who are teachers and they are tired. So underpaid and tired that they don’t want to be teachers anymore. How is this happening? Lets look at an entry-level accounting associate at a Big Four for a minute. I’ve heard horror stories of them working from 7am-2am. Look at them, working double of what a teacher works, you may say. I have friends in this field though, and they say they do it because there is a high reward in the future. They know that if they keep at it, they will become a partner and make huge money. So where is this incentive for a teacher? And why would the brightest, most qualified people choose to become a teacher if there are better options? We need to make this job as respected as lawyers and doctors.

I went to public school in Japan for a month every year during summer break when I was a kid. I then went on to volunteer at that same school as an assistant English teacher. Teachers in Japan are so respected and involved in the child’s life that they’ll go so far as to paying a visit to a student’s home if the student is caught past curfew at the mall. Teachers in Japan are looked up to, respected, and acknowledged by the community. They are in the same arena as lawyers. They aren’t people you look at and say, ‘Awww that’s nice, you’re a teacher’ in a condescending way. Pause, do you agree with me that in America, some people have a superiority complex over teachers? As if it was an easy route? Maybe the fact is that it has become that way in America. Yeah, maybe the quality of teachers really isn’t that great, and that’s why people assume it’s a job for the less intelligent. So we need to alter the amount of respect given to teachers and we need to do that by paying them better and therefore making it more competitive, especially in poorer areas.

That smelly guy next to me might smell, but he’s at the library, typing furiously on some sort of essay or story, I don’t know. He’s here on some level, trying to break his own cycle. If he had numerous brilliant, free, inspiring role models as a kid, who he saw every day for 12 years of his early development, would he be the same person?