Honoring the Teacher's Heart

Teaching is not for the faint of heart. Here is the speech I recently wrote in preparation for our teacher’s negotiations for an increase in pay. The introductory passage is from Sam Intrator’s “The Courage to Teach; Honoring the Teacher’s Heart”.

     “I am the son of two recently retired public school teachers. Combined, they racked up sixty-five years of service. We once sat down and figured out that between them, they had taught more than sixty thousand classes and five thousand students. They were lifers, as were most of their friends.

     Though chalk may not course through my veins, teaching is in my blood. So when I came home one day and told my parents that I had just applied for teaching college, I didn’t anticipate their reaction.  

     ‘What? Why did you do that? You should look at other options.’ my father said, clearly dismayed at my decision.

     ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into,’ my mother said quite ominously.

      From the vantage point of a child, teaching had been good to my parents. We traveled every summer as a family, and returning as a teacher to the schools of my youth seemed a virtuous channel to direct my brimming-over-the-top idealism. Curious about my parents’ disappointment and chagrin but blithely undaunted, I quit my job as an editorial assistant in a plush Manhattan high rise and began subbing in New York City schools.

     Sixteen years later, I better understand their response. In fact, most teachers I know have told me something similar. ‘Maybe I would do this job again, but I hope my son or daughter does something different.’

     As my dad told me, ‘This job can wear you down. There’s a lot of gratuitous clucking about how we must value and support teachers. Then you get in there and it’s pretty lonely and tough. I hoped might find something easier-find something that has more prestige, status, and honor.’

If you ask, my dad will tell you about cherished moments. He’ll tell you about the days when he believed he left an enduring impact on the world. My dad will also tell you that there were days when he could barely heft the chalk to the board and described classes so demanding that they reduced his knees to quaking knick-knocks.

     If you ask, he’ll tell you about how even after teaching the Gettysburg Address 150 times, watching Lincoln’s words settle in young minds, would still bring a tear to his eye.

     If you ask, he’ll also tell you about how, midway through his more than three decades in the classroom, resentment and anger with the system left him in the doldrums and he could barely summon the strength to come back one September. 

     But most of all, he’ll tell you that the best teachers he knew-the colleagues in the trenches he most admired-had heart, soul, energy, and a special effervescence that allowed them to ‘reach kids.’ I’d pick him up at after school some days, and we’d pass one of his colleagues and he’d turn to me and nod: 

‘She’s good,’ he’d say. ‘She reaches kids’.”

     Once you’ve given thirty-plus years of your life to something as absorbing as teaching, you come to know it well. It is not recognized how hard teaching is on the spirit. We think it’s about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. At the end of a particularly successful lesson, there are no adults, like in other jobs to witnesses it; to share in our accomplishments of that moment. At this school, we have teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can connect with their students. On top of that, they have faith in the importance of their work. Keeping that faith over time is not easy.
I share these snippets of commentary - the thoughts and feelings on the "teacher’s heart," because they represent to us the backdrop for this round of negotiations. Teachers need technique, and they need subject matter expertise, but these matter little without the presence of heart and inspiration. The dictionary tells us that to do something "with heart" means to inspire with confidence, to embolden, to encourage, and to animate. To teach with heart means to be a genuine human presence in the lives of students.
      In other words, if schools are to be places that promote academic, social, and personal development for students, everything hinges on the presence of intelligent, passionate, caring teachers working day after day in our nation’s classrooms. Teachers have a colossal influence on what happens in our schools, because day after day, we are the ultimate decision makers and tone setters. We shape the world of the classroom by the activities we plan, the focus we attend to, and the relationships we nurture.
     If we want to attract and retain intelligent, passionate, caring teachers, we had better figure out what will sustain their vitality and faith in teaching. Education depends on what teachers do in their classrooms, and what teachers do in their classrooms is shaped by who they are, what they believe, and how vital and alive they are when they step before their students.

Sam Intrator continues:

  “We need our spirit, but we need to make a fair living. This society pays rainmakers-it pays the people who generate money. Teachers don’t generate money. You can’t forget this truth. It’s hard for teachers to feel valued and honored in this society, when your worth is often measured in what you’re paid. Paying teachers what they’re worth to society is a way to honor the teacher’s heart.”

      
As we embark as a first year teacher, we often are indifferent to the salary, to benefits and to pension considerations; but as we age, and are faced with college tuitions, mortgages or rent and childcare and a fair and reasonable standard of living after retirement, it serves as a mixed message about what we’re worth to the communities we serve. Honoring the teacher’s heart must mean more than flowers, cards, and cookies, no matter how well intentioned and well meaning. Honor implies being accorded respect and distinction. Honor means paying a teacher who has spent over twenty years serving the school community more than $650.00 a week.

It means equal pay for equal work
.
     Most of us are teaching double the workload of any other teachers. We are not comparable to the public system, or a private school whose teachers have classes smaller than twenty students and have twice the time to meet the required curriculum.
     It means that our outstanding early childhood department gets paid to reflect their excellence. It means that our retired teachers are able to pay their own medical insurance, not unable to afford health insurance packages. Honor ensures that retired teachers will earn more than $200.00 a month in pension, after dedicating over thirty years to the school. They will not be required to work as a substitute and they will not be forced to find additional work to live.
Even as we become caught up in questions of meaning, we are rightfully reminded that "paying teachers what they’re worth to society is a way to honor the teacher’s heart."
     The teachers of Talmud Torah have taught for reasons of ideals and virtue: we connect with children, we convey passion for our subjects, and hope to inspire a love for learning and goodness. Bill Ayers calls our teaching "world-changing work" and then goes on to say:

     “People are called to teaching because they love children and youth, or because they love being with them, watching them open up and grow and become more able, more competent, and more powerful in the world. They may love what happens to themselves when they are with children, the ways in which they become their best selves. Or they become teachers because they love the world or some piece of the world enough that they want to show that love to others. In either case, people teach as an act of construction and reconstruction and as a gift of oneself to others. We teach in the hope of making the world a better place.^”

     It is with these sentiments that we will ask for an increase in our pay. We will ask for a reasonable standard of living in a city whose costs are spiraling out of control. We ask for the board to recognize that the inflation rate is far surpassing our income advances. We will ask that your community will honor our retiring teachers with a reasonable standard of living after devoting their lives to teaching. 

We will ask you to honor the teacher’s heart.