Monday, January 31, 2005
Stand back...I'm a professional. (or am I?)
So the other night I was at a friend's birthday party. Unlike most of my social get-togethers since I entered the teaching profession, the majority of the people at this party were not fellow educators. Perhaps this merely serves to demonstrate how very cloistered my life has become. In any case, as we feasted on buffalo wings and extra spicy popcorn, conversations sprung up and unsurprisingly, the topic of teaching arose. One of the guests was considering a career in teaching, and she had some interesting questions about what it was like to teach in an inner city school. (The answers to those questions were as follows: No, No, Yes, inconsistency on the administration's part, middle school, and it's enough to live on.)
Later on, there were assorted entertainments, including two packets worth of quiz bowl, with guests divided a la The Apprentice into book smart and street smart teams. In contrast to the TV show however, book smarts (the team on which I played) made its commanding presence known! Pop culture? Academic? It was all good. And of course as this was a party, the taunting was like the old story about the boy scout camping trip, i.e. intense! It was after one such jibe on my part that the party's host jokingly asked how many people in the room were not underemployed. I raised my hand along with all the other lawyers and lawyers in training, only to learn that as a high school teacher with an Ivy League education, I was intended to be among the ranks of the underemployed. I was annoyed at this characterization, although in retrospect, I can understand how it might make sense. After all, I went to a good school and rather than entering a more lucrative field like law, business, or medicine, I chose to be a teacher. Two roads diverging in the yellow wood, and all that jazz.
Now all jobs have their positive and negative sides, and despite the tendency of this blog to focus on the latter for comedic effect, the same can be said for teaching. One major downside of teaching is that so few people recognize educators as professionals, who have undergone serious training and willingly subject themselves to some of the more stressful and exhausting environs out there on a daily basis five times each week. Instead, people at the higher levels of administration tend to see teachers as mere cogs in an educational machine intended to churn out graduates regardless of actual knowledge or passing grades. Shoddy treatment from above leads in turn to disaffected and apathetic teachers forced to dig through the rubble of their shattered ideals in the hopes of creating lessons that might reach one student instead of a whole class. And this frustration is only compounded when the general public reinforces this perceived lack of importance. Where is the prestige of being an educator? If someone says they are a lawyer or a doctor, that carries a level of respect. But teachers, without whom there would be neither lawyers or doctors, or at the very least competent ones, are considered "underemployed."
The blame for this general perception is partly based on a natural tendency to judge success materially, when in point of fact, there is more to life than money...or so I have read. Maybe my example, as put forth on this webpage, is not the best, but I know there are veteran teachers out there, people with 20 years of teaching experience, who love their jobs and excel at them. And that these people should not be considered the professional equals of any of the aforementioned fields is something of a sad travesty.
So do I feel underemployed? Quite the contrary, if anything I feel overemployed...my job takes up far more of my time than I ever expected going into it. It is possible that this is merely a consequence of Parkinson's Law ("Work expands to fit the time allotted), but I feel it is more likely a combination of factors. For me the biggest one involves a quest for self-improvement. In order to maintain a level of professionalism, hard work is required both inside and outside the workplace, and if I ever hope to be viewed as a professional by non-educators, I feel it only necessary to put in more time. In other words, if I put in the amount of work that people expect from a professional, it is more likely I will be viewed as one. And perhaps I'll believe that in truth I am a professional and not just an overpaid babysitter.
Or so one might hope...
So the other night I was at a friend's birthday party. Unlike most of my social get-togethers since I entered the teaching profession, the majority of the people at this party were not fellow educators. Perhaps this merely serves to demonstrate how very cloistered my life has become. In any case, as we feasted on buffalo wings and extra spicy popcorn, conversations sprung up and unsurprisingly, the topic of teaching arose. One of the guests was considering a career in teaching, and she had some interesting questions about what it was like to teach in an inner city school. (The answers to those questions were as follows: No, No, Yes, inconsistency on the administration's part, middle school, and it's enough to live on.)
Later on, there were assorted entertainments, including two packets worth of quiz bowl, with guests divided a la The Apprentice into book smart and street smart teams. In contrast to the TV show however, book smarts (the team on which I played) made its commanding presence known! Pop culture? Academic? It was all good. And of course as this was a party, the taunting was like the old story about the boy scout camping trip, i.e. intense! It was after one such jibe on my part that the party's host jokingly asked how many people in the room were not underemployed. I raised my hand along with all the other lawyers and lawyers in training, only to learn that as a high school teacher with an Ivy League education, I was intended to be among the ranks of the underemployed. I was annoyed at this characterization, although in retrospect, I can understand how it might make sense. After all, I went to a good school and rather than entering a more lucrative field like law, business, or medicine, I chose to be a teacher. Two roads diverging in the yellow wood, and all that jazz.
Now all jobs have their positive and negative sides, and despite the tendency of this blog to focus on the latter for comedic effect, the same can be said for teaching. One major downside of teaching is that so few people recognize educators as professionals, who have undergone serious training and willingly subject themselves to some of the more stressful and exhausting environs out there on a daily basis five times each week. Instead, people at the higher levels of administration tend to see teachers as mere cogs in an educational machine intended to churn out graduates regardless of actual knowledge or passing grades. Shoddy treatment from above leads in turn to disaffected and apathetic teachers forced to dig through the rubble of their shattered ideals in the hopes of creating lessons that might reach one student instead of a whole class. And this frustration is only compounded when the general public reinforces this perceived lack of importance. Where is the prestige of being an educator? If someone says they are a lawyer or a doctor, that carries a level of respect. But teachers, without whom there would be neither lawyers or doctors, or at the very least competent ones, are considered "underemployed."
The blame for this general perception is partly based on a natural tendency to judge success materially, when in point of fact, there is more to life than money...or so I have read. Maybe my example, as put forth on this webpage, is not the best, but I know there are veteran teachers out there, people with 20 years of teaching experience, who love their jobs and excel at them. And that these people should not be considered the professional equals of any of the aforementioned fields is something of a sad travesty.
So do I feel underemployed? Quite the contrary, if anything I feel overemployed...my job takes up far more of my time than I ever expected going into it. It is possible that this is merely a consequence of Parkinson's Law ("Work expands to fit the time allotted), but I feel it is more likely a combination of factors. For me the biggest one involves a quest for self-improvement. In order to maintain a level of professionalism, hard work is required both inside and outside the workplace, and if I ever hope to be viewed as a professional by non-educators, I feel it only necessary to put in more time. In other words, if I put in the amount of work that people expect from a professional, it is more likely I will be viewed as one. And perhaps I'll believe that in truth I am a professional and not just an overpaid babysitter.
Or so one might hope...
