If It Didn't Suck....

The best intentions and the optimistic light that had burned bright in my eyes were extinguished about ten minutes into my first day of work as a licensed Pedagogue in the New York City school system. The joke I make is that I was burned out before I started and while the statement is half true I did have some hopes that it was a good job, the right job for me, and I would grow old in the profession, never tiring of it, but loving it increasingly more and more as the years went on. I went to college, and majored in English and took a minor in Education, Secondary Ed mind you, not Elementary Ed, there is a stigma attached to males who become Elementary Teachers you know, not that was the reason for my choice. The main reason that I made the choice to be a High School English teacher was that I wanted to be able to talk to soon to be adults about books and ideas and hopes and dreams and all that liberal horse manure that they ram down your throats in the colleges and Ed courses in America. Not that I am bitter.

I wanted to teach because of those reasons and because I would have a lot of time off, time to write, time to vacation and time to relax. Ten plus years later and I haven’t gone anywhere except for my Honeymoon in Miami (hey it was such an event it deserved to be in bold, in caps AND italicized) and haven’t written anything but this piece you have before you. And as for spare time, well don’t make me laugh. Summers off, well if I didn’t have them, if most of us didn’t have them we would eat our guns. Well we don’t have guns but you know what I am talking about, and it burns me that every other profession out there mocks up saying we are overpaid and under worked, I would like to see them trade places with me for a month and see if they can handle it. I bet you they would run screaming into the night, well screaming into the street to their car and driving away never to return. God bless direct deposit you know? There was a major drive for other professions to come into the teaching industry, most of them didn’t last the year. The rest are now climbing up to AP positions. The Fellow program we those have people in them who bail the second their obligation is done. The statistics when I started were abysmal and have only gotten worse. I believe it was something like that 30 % of all new teachers leave within the first year and another 40 or more percent leave with the first for years. So we only retain about 30 percent of our profession, and a certain amount of those remaining go into administration. Then they say we have got to get rid of bad teachers. Well go ahead you already got rid of the good ones.