The Teacher

A different face but the same school in spirit

There are few professions I admire more in life than one of the most under paid ones, the teacher.  Perhaps the fact that both my parents were teachers has augmented my understanding and sympathy.  My father was a professor at the university level and my mother taught those that no one else wanted to teach.  I guess it was a tribute to her dedication that she would actually take up the mantle and give a final shot to those whom mainstream education had cast aside.  She worked for a program called S.A.V.E. that acted as a kind of last chance for many kids to get a diploma.  Each student was filled with a litany of problems.  Difficulties in life that made education seem like an unneeded add on.  On the other hand, education was the one element that provided any structure to their lives.  I am sure that the social studies teacher/gym teacher/part time counselor and sympathetic ear my mother was definitely must have helped.

Hardly a day goes by when the name or face of one of my former educators doesn't pass through my mind.  Some are departed yet their words and their kindness left an indelible mark on who I am as a person.  Sure there were many terrible ones but the good ones seem to compensate tenfold over.  It is difficult to define impact.  Often subject matter is a only a tiny part of it.  Some where hidden within the experience are so many other areas of development.  They include kindness, intellectual growth, understanding, interest, desire to explore different ideas and often times simply friendship.

The later is a concept that causes me some of the greatest lament in what we have become as a society and where we limit our teachers from the impact they have on the lives of their students.  I can remember so many closed door conversations or rides home from school.  Today that has vanished.  Doors are never closed lest their be an accusation of impropriety.  No teacher would ever consider taking a student to his or her home or having them to their house as a guest.   On every tree there is a bad apple yet the result has been wide spread over reaction.

James Curran

While they only stayed with me for a few years of my life I still miss some of the most special ones.  Jim Curran and Cathy Parise were two of them.  Jim was my debate coach, English teacher and friend.  In a way we grew together.  He was just a student teacher assigned to my junior high English class when I first met him.  He used to sit with me in the lunch room and tell me odd stories/jokes about cows.  Most of the other students didn't understand him but I did.  I think he was a lot like me. Later he became an English teacher and when the long time debate coach Mrs. Simmons abruptly retired he stepped in.    I had wanted to study under the great Mrs. Simmons and as a sophomore with her encouragement pleaded to the administration to allow me to take her class early.  Usually it was only available to juniors and seniors.  As administrators usually do, they turned their back on enthusiasm and desire to learn offering me a categorical rejection.  I even tried to bring my mother into the picture but to no avail.    Jim knew how badly I wanted to be in debate and I like to think that in a way when he stepped into the great Mrs. Simmons shoes, he did it for me.  Jim was more than a coach and teacher, he was a friend.  Sadly I have lost contact with him but I am sure he is still telling cow stories to some student somewhere.

A second teacher Cathy Parise arrived at my school and became both a drama coach/director and English teacher.  In retrospect I seemed to have had an affection with English and perhaps the genesis of this very blog was born in the tender hands of Cathy and Jim.  Cathy was another true friend and a person that as a high school student I felt I could relate to. She also shared my sense of drama and attraction to the arts, special qualities for a teacher and a person.  She cast me as a lead in one of her plays and after a considerable gap of time remains friends with me to this day.

Peggy Nemeth

Special teachers and professors continue to color my memory and I wonder which of my son's he will remember in the same way.  One dear friend of mine has been a teacher during various periods of her life and is currently teaching high school English in Fresno, California.  Her students are largely Hispanic and I often think she must occupy a role very similar to the one my mother once filled in these kids lives.  Peggy Nemeth or PK as I call her is enormously talented and dedicated to her profession.  I don't know if she can possibly understand how much I admire her for the job that she does yet I do and I hold her in great reverence.

The job of a teacher is terribly hard.  We all gush in envy at the summers off and seemingly shorter school days but the truth is they don't begin to compensate for the hours of course preparation spent creating and grading.  It is a job that never ends and is constantly in need of updating and refocusing.  Teaching is not static, it is a constantly changing art and the teacher is an artist with a canvas as far reaching as the human mind.

The average teacher pay in America today is $39,000.  This is the compensation for a person entrusted to mold the minds of the future of our society.  Three nations wildly considered some of the most educated in the world are Singapore, South Korea and Finland.  In each of these nations teachers are drawn from the top strata of the society and are extremely well respected and paid.  In South Korea and Singapore teachers on average are paid more than lawyers and engineers.

In America elements of our society choose to vilify the profession as opposed to support it.  They group them into a general damnation of public service as a whole considering only the soldier as worthy of their adulation. Why do we as a society not  respect the profession that made us who we are?  America's strength was long considered our public education yet rather than support it, some vilify it.  They tout the benefits of a private education no common person could ever afford.   The sad reality is that often the teachers in their private schools receive even less pay than public school teachers.

At one point in my life I had convinced myself to quit my government job and become a teacher.  I was in Bolivia and planned to finish my time and then return to the states, locate in Oregon on the coast and receive my teaching certificate.   I wanted to teach history with incredible enthusiasm and dedication.  As my time in Bolivia came to an end security, income and benefits got the best of me and I retired that ambition to the dustbin of lost ideas.

One argument that pricks the hair on my neck is when I hear someone ask why they should pay for schools when they don't even have children?  This is usually followed by some litany about banning the organization that supports national teaching standards, the Department of Education.  Were it not for these standards states like South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama could chose to educate their children void of science.  Can anyone truly be so short sighted as to not realize that the very children they are educating will some day provide for their needs as a member of our society?  Are they truly so myopic?

There are few professions that have the power to impact the life of a person.  Medicine might care for us when we are sick but only teaching will influence the person that we come.  In my life my mother, my father, Peggy Nemeth, Jim Curran, Cathy Parise and all the others that left their mark will always be loved and respected for the gift they gave me.  It is a gift I will carry to my grave and will in its own way live on in the life of my son.  Thank you, thank you all.

"In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years."  

~Jacques Barzun