Anti-Teacher Argument I Am Most Tired Of: “You Knew What You Were Getting Into” by Penelope Millar

I think the anti-teacher argument I’m most tired of is “you knew what you were getting into”.

Yes. Yes I did.

It wasn’t this.

18 years ago when I was a high school senior deciding what to do with my life, I chose to go to college planning to become a high school teacher. At that time, the news said that near 1/4 of teachers would be retiring in the next five years, so a job shouldn’t be hard to find. Teachers were paid a decent if not amazing salary with guaranteed yearly step increases. They had a good pension plan and health insurance coverage with low premiums and copays. Standardized testing was just a minor aspect of schools. (NCLB was passed the year I graduated high school.)

Today, I teach in an environment unimaginable before NCLB, in which standardized testing and meaningless data rules all. It’s not just the state test, gotta take the county benchmark tests to see if they’re prepared for the state test. (None of these tests are reliable & valid measures of learning.) I teach in a world in which the push is to raise “on time graduation rates” without any in depth consideration of whether those kids really should be graduating. I teach in a world where somehow it’s ok to plop a kid in front of a computer to “make up” the entire first semester of a course in two weeks- even as the students themselves admit that they don’t learn anything from those courses.

Meanwhile, those “guaranteed step increases” haven’t existed since 2008 and every single “raise/COLA” I’ve had since then has been entirely eaten by health insurance costs. That includes the one I got for finishing my masters degree, which I’m still paying off since they axed the tuition reimbursement I was promised after the first semester. As for the pension, well, I’m really lucky there since I got hired early enough to be on the “good plan”- if the state government doesn’t raid the pension fund like a lot of other states have been doing.

This isn’t even getting into the effect of cell phones or the rise of helicopter parenting. And yes, I know that people in plenty of other industries are dealing with the same bs. They shouldn’t have to either.

So basically, don’t tell me I knew what I was getting into because this profession was VERY different when I made that choice in 2000. There’s some reasons enrollments in teacher prep programs are down these days. I honestly don’t think I would encourage anyone graduating high school today to get into this profession, especially not considering what college tuition costs.