Sunday was Teacher Appreciation Day at Dodger Stadium. So, my family, full of educators, attended the game against the Cincinnati Reds at Chavez Ravine. (And my youngest son won a foul ball hit by Shohei Ohtani, a souvenir that easily makes up for the high price of a ticket.)
But my wife couldn’t attend Teacher Appreciation Day. Because she is a teacher. And teachers often work on Sundays.
Summer vacation is approaching, but there is no soft landing when school days remain.
This personal irony perfectly illustrates the particular way we treat teachers. On the one hand, their high status in society is undisputed: politicians seek their support, polls show Americans trust them more than most other categories of workers, and once a year the Dodgers give paying fans a gift. glass Or pullover displaying an apple in their honor.
On the other hand is a hidden reality that I saw during 15 years of marriage to a teacher:
The iPhone sets an alarm at 4 a.m. to resume lesson planning after passing out the day before from exhaustion. The endless test writing and grading. The heartbreaking feeling that if students tune out during a lesson or perform below expectations, it’s the teacher’s fault.
It’s work done, in roughly equal parts, inside and outside the classroom. Everyone envies what they see – the 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. workday and summer vacations – without realizing the countless morning, evening and weekend hours spent away from their own children so that raising yours seems easy.
You don’t have to marry a professor to understand the psychological consequences of all this. Although burnout affects workers in all professions, a 2022 Gallup poll found that it hits teachers hardest. Research has shown teacher burnout correlates with poorer student outcomesAnd according to education news site ChalkbeatStates that track turnover in schools (California is not one of them) have reported that educators are leaving the field at record rates in recent years.
I see the symptoms of this upheaval all the time, often in the annual soul-searching among teacher friends about whether they can take another year of this type. These people aren’t here for summer vacations or museum discounts.
But most eventually return to the classroom, so it’s worth asking: what’s supporting them? What keeps them coming back?
I have an idea, and while my sample size is small by research standards, it provides plenty of anecdotal evidence.
My wife and two of her sisters are teachers, their mother is a retired teacher, and their late grandfather worked at Los Angeles Unified when it was called Los Angeles City School District. Jokes and acronyms from the education world (damn, the endless acronyms) intersperse our conversations.
And of course, teachers who read the Times (and sometimes even their students) to write letters to the editor shed light on the reality inside their classrooms.
From all of this, here’s my takeaway: For every demanding administrator or parent, there are at least 10 students who revere their teacher or at least act like they understand the amount of work that goes into it all. For many students, people like my wife and her sisters are some of the most important adults in their lives – not quite surrogate parents, but indispensable in a way that only empathetic, trained educators can be .
So the work itself may be rewarding, but material support from the rest of society – not the kind of ostentatious, empty praise already given in abundance – is insufficient. We can, of course, pay teachers a lot more (because nothing protects against burnout better than a bigger salary), but for most districts that’s not a given, with California’s budget deficit estimated to $56 billion over the next two years.
Here’s another approach that may seem unrelated: We can build a lot of housing, and then build more. With a starting salary of around $60,000 a year, new teachers can forget about renting their own apartment in Los Angeles, much less living near their school. Subsisting on a young teacher’s salary might be feasible if we solved our housing shortage.
But these are long-term solutions. If you want to show that you appreciate the work of teachers and understand their plight, here’s a tip: Don’t tell them how wonderful their lives must be because they’re about to take a summer vacation.
California Daily Newspapers
