thoughts, words, deeds

this just makes me sad

The Sunday News! In February, teachers throughout the entire state of West Virginia went on strike , citing poor working conditions including low salaries and rising costs of benefits. Strikes by public employees aren't legal in WV, yet the teachers have been willing to take the risk because the situation can't get much worse, and there aren't enough certified teachers in the state in part because starting salaries are startlingly low. What do you think? What's a fair salary for teacher, based on the expectations faculty administrations and parents place on them? Any other thoughts on the topic?

First off, I am not a teacher. I’ve worked as an instructor for university (on a graduate assistant’s pay), I have grandparents, parents, aunts, and siblings who are teachers, and I’ve had a lot of teachers over the years, and I’m trying to get a teaching job, but I’m not a teacher. I don’t have the certification. I also have never been directly affected by a strike (although when my father worked for the phone company, he had to go out when strikes were on and fix things because he was salaried).

I know that most teachers are over worked and under paid. They have more homework than their students. A conscientious teacher will want to do more for his or her students than he or she can. They spend hours with them, more waking hours than even their parents when the children are in elementary school. I think that most teachers should be paid more than they are. They should also get the kind of respect that few of them receive. From what I read in the article, West Virginia’s teachers are some of the poorest paid and most overworked in the nation.

I even understand that West Virginia has a history of strikes and that the communities are supportive of what the teachers have done. However, I think that this disruption of classes over the past month is going to ultimately hurt the students of West Virginia without helping the teachers in the ways that they need. The legislators are going to waffle about and maybe fix something, and then, the teachers will go back, and their students will be a month behind—and that includes in things like standardized tests, college entrance exams, graduations—all those things that should have been doing over the past month.

West Virginia is a rural state, but that doesn’t mean that its children don’t deserve consistent education. I don’t like the fact that while the teachers (and their students, I understand from the article) are participating in their right to fight for their teacher’s livelihood, the students are not in classrooms. Learning is a cumulative process. We build upon the things that we’ve learned yesterday to grasp the new concepts of tomorrow, and these students are having an involuntary break. When they come back, instead of being at the March or April level in their lessons, they’ll still be in January, or worse, will have regressed to December or November. And that makes me sad.

I wish there was a better way of fixing things.