Striking Teachers
Week nr. 1 of the nationwide teacher's strike is over and there is no end in sight. Icelandic media coverage has portrayed the teachers as being mean and greedy buggers who are destroying a whole generation of Icelandic youth.
A starting salary for a new teacher in Iceland is somewhere around $30 000 (currency today, with USD so ridiculously low) a year. For somebody with a college degree- and no doubt hefty student loans to repay- who has to deal with a roomful of children ALL day. I'd strike just to get some peace and quiet. Knowing me, I'd probably strike the kids.
Sure we all had at least one teacher who made our lives miserable. Mine drove me nuts all through out third grade. I vaguely remember screaming fights and sulking during detention. Odd thing though, last year I was doing a project where interviewing elementary school kids was a vital part, and lo and behold, there she was. There were chills running down my spine. And she recognized me. And she HUGGED me (actually if there is a licensed therapist reading this, please advice on how to deal with that particular trauma).
Turns out, teachers are human, even the ones that seemed like monsters at the time. They eat, ergo they need money like the rest of us. However, they are in a profession where the career ladder is short and the chances of making big bucks are slim to none.
Some years ago I attended my ten year high school reunion. Out of a graduating class of 52, about 17 had gone on to become teachers of some sort.
I know, you are still thinking about the dwarfed size of my graduating class aren't you? Long story short: Language minority school in a country other than Iceland, NOT private. If you'd met my parents you'd know there was no chance of me having gone to private school.
Anyhow, these former classmates were teachers and they were almost all doing various workshops and attending classes to further themselves in order to be better teachers, not to make more money. Not only do they have to remember all that stuff that at least I have forgotten, like GRAMMAR, or biology, but these days they supposed to make sure each child is doing all right, they are supposed to look for signs of abuse, they have to make sure that the internal relationships between the kids is bullying-free and healthy.
In some parts of the world they even have to worry about getting physically hurt in their work place.
They are doing a lot of the work that parents who are out there forging careers and making money tend to forget. It used to be that they had great long vacations, but nowadays they are expected to not only work with planning and such, but also re-educating themselves, taking classes on new policies and methods.
I say giv'em all the money they want. Make sure it becomes a profession of well educated people who really want to be the best teachers they can be.
Which would you rather? That the teacher in front of your kid is thinking about the best way to make your offshoot connect the dots or how to meet next months bills?
A starting salary for a new teacher in Iceland is somewhere around $30 000 (currency today, with USD so ridiculously low) a year. For somebody with a college degree- and no doubt hefty student loans to repay- who has to deal with a roomful of children ALL day. I'd strike just to get some peace and quiet. Knowing me, I'd probably strike the kids.
Sure we all had at least one teacher who made our lives miserable. Mine drove me nuts all through out third grade. I vaguely remember screaming fights and sulking during detention. Odd thing though, last year I was doing a project where interviewing elementary school kids was a vital part, and lo and behold, there she was. There were chills running down my spine. And she recognized me. And she HUGGED me (actually if there is a licensed therapist reading this, please advice on how to deal with that particular trauma).
Turns out, teachers are human, even the ones that seemed like monsters at the time. They eat, ergo they need money like the rest of us. However, they are in a profession where the career ladder is short and the chances of making big bucks are slim to none.
Some years ago I attended my ten year high school reunion. Out of a graduating class of 52, about 17 had gone on to become teachers of some sort.
I know, you are still thinking about the dwarfed size of my graduating class aren't you? Long story short: Language minority school in a country other than Iceland, NOT private. If you'd met my parents you'd know there was no chance of me having gone to private school.
Anyhow, these former classmates were teachers and they were almost all doing various workshops and attending classes to further themselves in order to be better teachers, not to make more money. Not only do they have to remember all that stuff that at least I have forgotten, like GRAMMAR, or biology, but these days they supposed to make sure each child is doing all right, they are supposed to look for signs of abuse, they have to make sure that the internal relationships between the kids is bullying-free and healthy.
In some parts of the world they even have to worry about getting physically hurt in their work place.
They are doing a lot of the work that parents who are out there forging careers and making money tend to forget. It used to be that they had great long vacations, but nowadays they are expected to not only work with planning and such, but also re-educating themselves, taking classes on new policies and methods.
I say giv'em all the money they want. Make sure it becomes a profession of well educated people who really want to be the best teachers they can be.
Which would you rather? That the teacher in front of your kid is thinking about the best way to make your offshoot connect the dots or how to meet next months bills?
posted by disinterpreter at 10:23 AM
3 Comments:
Once again I applaud your point of view Elin. In former days, teachers enjoyed a certain social standing, a quiet authority in the local community, the arduousness of the task they performed earning them respect. The greater social mobility of late industrial society coupled with the high level of skill attainment required to become fully competent in daily interactions ought to have meant that the responsibility of those moulding the next generation of citizens was rewarded to a greater degree, whereas in our anonymous urban sprawls state sector teachers are being let down in the scramble for resources. Incompetent staff can leave permanent scars on the impressionable young psyche, whilst caring teachers can be a source of inspiration as well as motivation. Good and bad alike are paid a pittance and, as you correctly point out, in inner city areas the threat of violence and physical intimidation is on the increase. On a recent visit home I was appalled by the news that my chemistry tutor’s body had been fished out of the local river. The official verdict was suicide, but rumour has it that he was murdered by a gang of pupils. I never harboured any affection for the man at the time due to his caustic sarcasm and propensity to pick mercilessly on random students, yet my birth place regularly scores highest in polls sounding respondents out about the best place to live in the United Kingdom. Whilst the local newspaper described it as having an atmosphere of “shabby gentility”, I have gone on record less charitably, referring to it as “a middle class armpit of a town”, in short not the wasteland of cliché with teenagers roaming the shard-strewn streets in packs. I shudder to think back to what I and my friends must have been like in those hormone and acne-ridden years and concur with your verdict that the pay packets of the long-suffering mentors of our youth are too meagre. Spare a thought for academics, however. In Britain their work is chronically undervalued. I turned my back on my original career plan when the burden of debt from my stint as a research student began to overwhelm me. I could not feed my book addiction on even a Professor’s salary and so have opted for a middle-income bracket and job security instead. My former supervisors warned me off entering the portals of the ivory tower: they are strangled by red tape, unable to devote themselves to research. My compromise has its frustrations (mainly the result of too little by way of annual leave, which slows down my rate of publication), but at least I can support my family as the sole provider. All the best to the beleaguered teachers of Iceland, let’s hope they succeed in their efforts in wringing a few more krona out of the government!
My wife is a teacher and works very hard for long hours for the same salary that I get for basically mucking about with Unix all day. She deserves twice what I get. She has to deal with the kids of parents who shouldn't have been allowed to breed, but if anything goes wrong it's her fault, not those of the vile creatures she has to teach. Add to that constant interference from politicians using education as a political football, and you wonder why she does it.
Yes, I am very tired of this "dumbefying" trend, where academic knowledge is disqualified as elitist and snobbish right off the bat. It seems to me that there should be room for all sorts of knowledge, both academic and "street-smarts". Of course this anxious price tagging, where studies and research can only be funded if they are proven lucrative, is detremental to all of us. The very nature of research being that we don't know how the findings will affect us or, when.
It is ironic, to say the least, that at the same time as the news papers here are screaming bloody murder about the future of Icelandic children, that they do not see the direct correlation of justly rewarding the people they hold reponsible for this future.
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