Chris Herrington decided years ago that his reality was much more fun…
and he’s ready to tell you why.
Sit back and relax.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Well, I finally saw, “Waiting for Superman.” Okay. No and Yes. Maybe. Not so much. I’m thinking about it. Here we go.
Michelle Rhee. Geoffrey Canada. Randi Weingarten. If we start looking at the players at the top of this educational food chain, we will see a heated debate among stakeholders who have a belief that they are doing what they believe is best; fine. Rhee is an administrator. Canada is a community action educator. AFT is a union, and Weingarten is the boss. Canada got a lot of his funding from anti-union sources, some say. The big hubbub seems to be that 6% of the teachers are rotten and we need to weed them out, and then education will be fine, but the Union won’t let us fire them, so education is doomed? First off, this means that 94% of the teachers are doing an adequate job. Hmmm. That’s as highly effective as birth control. 80,000 people a year die from medical malpractice. I’m not saying that we should not dump the rotten teachers; I am saying that what is really totally wrong with education is not just the 6%, and I can’t help what New York has gotten themselves into. Here in Texas, my contract says that I can be terminated by their simply not renewing my contract and that there is a process by which I can be removed or reassigned at anytime. I earn the privilege of being rehired every year. If I were not doing my job, I would want to be fired. Anyone who is not doing his job needs to be fired. A job is not a given, and it never has been. It’s all part of the business cycle. And education is a business, I don’t care what they say. Would I like to be paid more? Sure. 10 years ago I made 43,600. Now I make $54,200. This exactly keeps up with inflation. Yes, the state pays for part of my insurance. And yes, I am never going to get rich teaching. Would I mind a system that rewards me for teaching more effectively? I was on the last merit pay step ladder, and it worked great for me. Have I ever seen ineffective teachers? Yes. But, in Texas we don’t have the lemon dance. People get non-renewed. The problem is in the number of hours we work as teachers, as far as pay is concerned. If you buy a small container, the substance in the container costs more per unit. Mouthwash in a one serving 1/9th ounce container costs $1,200 per gallon. A teacher with 8 years of college education who is only going to work for 9 months has a limited time to earn a living which must last for 12 months. If I worked summer school I might earn an additional $7,000, but being on call all day long with one emergency after another is wearing, and ½ of all first year teachers quit because it is a tough job and takes an emotional toll. Here is another way to look at teacher pay.
We can’t make more money because we are limited in the number of paid hours we work. I get off at 4:00. I get here and start working at 8:00, so my day consists of 8 hours. I work 186 days at 8 hours each, so I work 1488 hours. If that is all I ever had to do, I would be making $36.42. Now, to be fair, some days I work longer at school, but I do most of it at home. Then there are open house, school meetings, some conventions, and extra schooling that we do each year, including on-line credits to stay current, which may total another about 40 hours total, but even that leaves it at 1528, so $35.47 an hour. Now, this is all good and well, but then there may be grading and preparation to do, let’s say a teacher did only an hour a day, that would be an extra about 150 hours. I teach English I, English II, English III, English IV, Creative Writing, speech, and reading improvement. So, I may spend a few more hours preparing for the 4800 pieces of literature, the 350 authors, the time lines of history, the genres of literature, current events, and the multitude of higher thinking skills I need to teach within about 5000 subject areas from rock and rap to politics and religion. I studied world literature with Allen Ginsberg, took American poetry courses at UMASS, studied Sino-American relations at Smith College, have been to lectures by Robert Thurman, The Dalai Lama, Buckminster Fuller, and Timothy Leary. I take several classes yearly through Great Courses and have studied writing through them from the University of Iowa and 25 other universities. I went to the 150th anniversary of William Blake’s death at the Tate, the retrospectives of most modern and classic artists, including Picasso, the Impressionists, the French, Italian, and American masters, and hordes of lofts and art/theater openings. I wake up at around 4 a.m. almost every day to review the news, take music lessons, search videos to use in my classes and to generally keep myself abreast of what is going on in science, anthropology, High IQ circles, and in technology, film, teaching methodology, and, of course, art. I don’t watch sports at all, except for the occasional racquetball game, which I also play 3 times a week for 2 or more hours a night. I have no kids, and my wife is a professional who works late. Most people probably do not spend the amount of time I do prepping for classes, but I have made my life in the classroom; it is a choice I have made. All in all, I could have retired 5 years ago, and if I retried today, I would only make about $11,500 less per year; with food, travel, spending on my students, and time lost, the difference might really be more like $7,500. I am not here for the money; I love the work. But, if I spend an extra hour per day every day all year, since I get up at 4 a.m. in the summer and rewrite my curriculum every year, I guess that could be added in. One summer I spent 6 hours per day for 43 days filing 64 books of my old work in file cabinets. At a certain point, I may be paying to work here, seriously.
I am, after all, just a teacher. I get reasonably good evaluations, and I think the kids like the classes well enough, although I probably talk too much. Maybe I‘m the average. So, what is really wrong with education? I could tell by the pictures in the movie that there were way too many kids. I could tell that they have a system that is slow and antiquated. I could see where Canada’s having the parents on board was a total turn around. Everybody bought in. Even Canada. http://gothamschools.org/2010/05/03/new-harlem-childrens-zone-building-planned-for-public-housing/ It may be that the hype has gotten us to the door way, but the $100,000,000 that Canada got is not going to happen for everyone. And it may not last for him. What will happen if we jump out of the public system and into a private system that goes bust? This is always the problem with change; once it gets started we will be worse off if we stop or go back. In any case, if we go private totally, I am not afraid to go to an interview and sell myself. For that reason, I keep all of my files, tests, Power Points, and work sheets on a thumb drive on my keychain. Switching jobs, being down-sized, becoming obsolete, needing new skills, or interviewing for a new job could happen at any time, and I role model for my students what I teach: learning how to think is more important than learning what to think. Everything I need to consult, mediate, intervene, or tutor is at my fingertips at any moment, and I have an extra digital copy with printed copies of the most complex work with me at all times. Why do we need to be this prepared?
Let’s look at the reason for unionizing and collective bargaining in the first place. Unions are a democratic way to make a decision in a business, although the owners might think of that as unreasonable since they believe that they need to make all the decisions in most cases. The owners should be able to do whatever they want with their own businesses, I agree, within reason. Labor has to have a contract; this outlines what their job duties are and makes them accountable. That contract can be subject to change, but there does need to be an ongoing decision process that includes both parties. If the owners change or have a need to change the terms, labor needs to have a reasonable point of redress. Otherwise, why not hire someone, then just not pay him? Or, why not work him 5 hours overtime for free? Or why not put him in harm’s way and then not be responsible for his health? In fact, if he has a suggestion for making the entire thing run more smoothly, why not just bully him into shutting up? It’s your factory, or store, or institution, or school, right?
We have buildings that don’t function, but that’s only part of it. We’ve got teachers that are hired on that are substandard the day they sign their contracts because they are only getting paid the minimum the schools can get away with. California has had a teacher shortage for years, 10’s of thousands short! Why? Few people are willing to do the job for that price. What I challenge these people to do is to come into the schools and teach for a week. They have no idea what we do. People who do often tell me that they would not do my job for anything.
And the things you hear from people! One young man, who had been talking out in class, was asked by me to step outside for a minute to clear the air and find out what was on his mind. I find that most things can be settled in a few minutes by my being interpersonal and getting to the heart of the matter. As we got outside, he posed a question to me this way, “Mr. Chris, you are always giving advice to kids about things, but do you have any kids of your own?” I thought he was showing genuine concern, and with my heart on my sleeve I returned the favor be sharing my story. My wife and I had gone to an endocrinologist, done all the modern things we could, and finally gotten pregnant twice, but, in both cases, at 8 weeks the pregnancies had ended in miscarriages. He continued with his voice of concern, and asked, “Does your wife work?” I told him that she did, and then replied, “Well, see there’s your problem; if you were a real man, your wife wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have killed your babies.”
I’m sure that somewhere in his head he was either trying to be deadly cruel or he was speaking from some odd need to be advising me since he felt that I was about to lecture him about his having been talking in class, but I turned directly at him and said, “I’m one of the few people in the world being supportive of you right now, and you will even take a swipe at me; you must really be hurting.”
It was one of my finest hours, for sure. That hit me like a Mack truck, but it must have cost him every shred of integrity to hit me so low. Maybe he slept like a baby that night. This is not my worst story, and I have made plenty of boneheaded mistakes in my teaching career. All in all, this just indicates that there may be 6% of the teachers who are not worth keeping, but there may be more problems than simply poor teachers. The job is difficult at times. I’m no superman; I’m not super human. I’m just plain old flesh and blood. I have contacted my union about 15 times in 34 years, mostly to check on if I had paid my dues to make sure I have insurance. I called the other day to find out if the multiplier was going to be lowered, from 2.3 to 2.0., a potential loss of about $7,500 per year, or about $225,000 over my life expectancy. If I have worked for 34 years with the expectation to be able to afford to retire and now the contract is going to be changed, I hope that America with forgive my having a lump in my throat. Maybe the kid was right. If I had been a smart man, I would have gone into business or banking or politics; those guys seem to have all the answers and all of the money.
If they had paid me $2.00 an hour per kid for that 34 years, I would have earned 34 years x 186 days X 8 X 15 X 2.00 = $1,517,760 or $44,640 per year for all 34 years. As it was, I started out at $9,300 in 1975. I did slightly better than inflation. I’m not a CEO. I’m just a high powered babysitter, if that’s the way you see it. I doubt that some parents could get anyone to watch their kids at any price. When you do that month after month for 9 months, it’s like carrying 50 or 100 or 200 babies. From June 4th to August 11th, I try to rest, with summer conferences, updates, new textbooks, and reassignments to new courses to teach. Our “three months off” amounts to 2 months and 7 days. I make about $2.43 an hour per child: I teach morals, civics, reading, writing, computer use, ethics, contract theory, literature, grammar, philosophy, psychology, art history, technology, economics, group dynamics, budgeting, family mediation, relationship intervention, life planning, and a host of mental gymnastics exercises. Let’s see your regular babysitter do that!
runningturtle87
Having completed 32 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests. He teaches at the Martin School of Choice, plays racquetball, and enjoys his job.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
