The Joys of Teaching

Payday has come at last. It's always such a novelty to walk to the refridgerator, open the door, and see it full.

I feel like I am provisioning myself for a great artic voyage when I do my payday shopping. My cart is always overflowing with dog food, milk, cheese, toilet tissue, and the other day-to-day necessities. I see other people staring at the cart in sort of perplexed wonder as I struggle to maneuver it, and I want to tell them, "If you had to buy everything you need for the month in one fell swoop, you'd shop like this, too."

This is teacher life. We live from once-a-month payday to once-a-month payday for a pittance. No other profession would do this. I can't for the life of me figure out why we do, either. Oh, there's the great argument that "we love what we do, so money shouldn't be the issue." There's something to be said for that, I suppose, but I grew up in a teacher household, and I am now a teacher household myself, and I am all too familiar with the problems money could ease. After all, no amount of love for one's job can put a new roof on one's house.

The crappiest part of it is that every year, the legislature plays a coy game with funding for education. They pretend they are going to fully fund us, but then they put it off, take bits of the budget for other things, give themselves payraises, and tell us to make do. It doesn't really matter who gets elected, either. Every election year is filled with the propaganda of education reform and funding. Every following term is filled with fattened off-shore accounts and personal purses for the legislators and tighter belts and more sacrifices on the part of the teachers.

I received less than two hundred dollars of classroom monies this year. I use my own money to provide Kleenex, pencils, cleaning supplies, paper for my printer, ink cartridges, and other "luxuries." I'm not the only teacher who does this by a long shot. Our already meager income is further reduced by trying to fill in the gaps for our funding. Why not spend the $200? Well, I have spent some of it. I used part of it to purchase some new instructional materials and to get supplies from our district warehouse. I'm hoarding the last $50 to try to have a chance to purchase some textbooks next year. To try to make you understand if you don't, last year I had to decide between buying whiteboard markers and having a filing cabinet that wasn't broken and useless. I chose the markers. After all, it was only my empty purse and a VCR I'd purchased with my own money that I put in the filing cabinet each day and hoped were safe.

I think that teachers are a people of hope. I don't know where it comes from. I think that deep down, we truly believe that one day the scales are going to fall from the political machine's eyes and somebody will say, "Hey! Did you know that teachers are molding the next generation. Maybe we'd better make sure they have enough food to do that with. Maybe we should give them something besides sticks and dirt to teach with!"

I don't know why I'm on this tangent tonight, or why the sight of two jugs of Red Diamond tea should have launched me into this, but it felt like the right thing to discuss. If you are a teacher, I know you understand. If you are not a teacher and you have the chance to kick one of our esteemed legislators down a steep flight of stairs, do if for all of us who wish we had the chance. In the meanwhile, we, the "few, the proud" will continue to do what we can.