Teaching Not Romantic, Lucrative, Even in Hallowed Halls of Universities
When I think about college professors, I think about:
Professor power couples; professor power couples’ houses; professor power couples’ houses’ bookshelves; sabbaticals in Tuscany; research projects in Crete ; potluck dinners and living room readings; affairs with students; tweed jackets; long black skirts and turtlenecks and blunt haircuts; worn leather briefcases; legal pads; fountain pens; Indiana Jones; walking to work in the fall with leaves circling your feet; pipes, perhaps; maybe an old dog.
When I think about high school teachers, I think about:
High school, which is terrible.
BUT! The thesis of this piece from The Millions is that I’m wrong as hell, and what’s actually terrible is trying to become a professor and what’s actually not that terrible is having a steady job teaching teenagers at a formative moment of their life and also everyday during regular school hours and earning a median salary of $53,230.
So many scare quotes it’s like a Zagat review!
As a former HS teacher: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The thing about teaching though, and especially in high school and ESPECIALLY in public school, is that you literally can’t go home and stop thinking about it. You’re either spending your free time working on lesson plans, or coaching one of the teams or running other extra curriculars, or mentoring stduents. It’s a 24/7 job. So that $50,000 a year paycheck really doesn’t justify how much time you put into your job.
@Megano! YES. I work far less as an attorney than does my dad, a public school teacher. He has been at it for many years, and still works extremely long hours (say, 7-4 or 5 at school, then 3-4 more hours of planning and grading most weeknights; and at least one full day every weekend.) Some of that is his style. A lot of it is just the sheer workload and creativity needed to be a great teacher!
@Megano! Professors may not have the coaching and so on, but there’s still all the outside pressures of publishing, conferences, research, committees, and the politics of the university system. So, yeah, teaching – you’d better reallyreally love it, regardless of the level/location!
@Saralyn@twitter At least professors get TAs though. My friend’s Dad is/was an elementary school teacher, and he couldn’t even make it through the summer without having to borrow money from my friend, because summer pay (at least in Ontario) is that bad.
@Megano! Trust me when I tell you that college teaching is also a 24/7 job, and 7 years in I’m making less (as a tenured professor at a public university) than my sister and brother-in-law, who teach high school (at an admittedly swank private school).
I could not, in good conscience, recommend that any of my students pursue a college teaching position at this point in the economic/academic/political clusterfuck of the American higher education system.
@Megano! And most professors don’t get TAs, in my experience. That is primarily at large universities, where there is often a larger pressure to publish/do research that pulls you away from the classroom. I have family and friends in both public elementary/high schools and in colleges/universities (including my mother, aunt, uncle, & grandfather), and both situations are draining, stressful, & (often) underpaid in different ways. Which is to say that setting up one as some kind of Perfect Teaching Environment (as I did with university teaching and the linked article seems to do a bit with HS) is bunk.
@Saralyn@twitter Oh no I’m not saying being a professor is less work, at least you have the option to get one (at least here, I think all of my professors in Uni had at least one [I had a history prof who only worked part time at my school and was not tenured and he had two], except for 4th year when they actually wanted to grade them, and Carleton isn’t even one of the bigger schools)
@Megano! I went to a college rather than a university, and no professors had TAs (nor the option to get one).
This post sums up both why I’ve always wanted to become a college professor and why I am no longer pursuing that career path.
One of the very best and tweediest literature professors I had in undergrad (his specialties were medieval literature and comics/graphic novels, I mean really) was recently denied tenure. This year he’ll be teaching at a local private school. I hope those rich kids appreciate him.
Everywhere I look, there’s someone telling me that I’m never going to get a job, ever, and I’ll always be as broke and stressed out and desperate as I am today, and that my life will never get any easier. I get enough of this from depressing Chronicle of Higher Education reports forwarded by professors who apparently want to make me regret ever agreeing to study with them. NOT YOU TOO, Thebillfold!
Don’t show this to my teacher friends here. That salary is unimaginably huge for public school teachers in my area (and for most jobs, really – I make about that and I am rolling in the dough compared to nearly everyone I know, and compared to me at any other point in my professional career).
Ms. BFF, with whom I once TAed a sophomore English class when we were HS juniors, just completed her first year as an HS English teacher, for a school year that began two days after she was hired. It was a mess: with her husband entering all her grades for her and her brother and I both grading entire periods worth of papers for her all year long, which she paid us for out of pocket (encouraged by her school), she was still constantly exhausted and getting up at 5 am to get her lesson plans done, with the end of every grading period being a disastrous all-nighter. Didn’t help that CA public schools require all kinds of afterschool ongoing teacher trainings which are either mandatory or necessary hoops to jump through to reach the next pay grade. Admittedly unperfect time management skills and some incredibly uninspiring students (remember, I graded those papers) aside, I can’t imagine that anyone’s time in such a system could be much of a breeze.
Best part? The California public school system lays off teachers at the end of the school year, and rehires them in fall. Except there’s no guaranteed job security in that, especially for the newbies. Ms. BFF didn’t get rehired at her school, and now gets to repeat the whole jobseeking process again. Yay! (Not yay.)