Insights at the End of a Teaching Career

I have 27 years in, so what you write speaks loudly to me. I recently finished reading Catherine Crier's "The Case Against Lawyers," in which she devotes an entire chapter to the problems in today's schools.

As I have 3-5 years to go (a long story), I would do it again if things were as they were when I began, but I would do some things differently. If I were potentially entering the field now knowing what I know now, I don't think I would.

Re4ply to bermbits
I enjoyed reading your response to my short effort. Yes, I too would not venture to do it all again. Psychologically, I think it is one of the main reasons I've never favoured reincarnation. I simply would not want to enter the field again on this mortal coil: not as a person, a tree of a bug or even a flower. to each his own, eh? I feel that way at 60 and when and if I get to 80 or 90 I'm sure I'll feel even more that way.-Ron

I first stepped into a classroom as a primary (elementary) teacher on February 1, 1975 and I have retirement date of July 15, 2016.

Teaching in NSW, Australia has become less and less rewarding to the inner soul. I still love working with the great majority of children that are entrusted to me. Most parents are pretty good too.

What limits my desire to encourage other young men and women to enter this profession is several-fold. In brief, (i) the litigious society, (ii) the administration and funding from the Federal and State governments in Australia, (iii) the bureaucrats at Federal, State and local levels who sap our funding and (mostly) do little to make the job in the classroom any better, (iv) a society/community that is encouraged to try to find small faults in schools and teachers and (v) a society that gives proportionally less in remuneration to those who teach than when I started.

(i) Parents and children who use the legal system as a threat to try to get teachers and schools to do things that don't really fit the situation.

(ii) Schools in the 1970s used to get 33.1% of all State govt funds ... now down to 26.9% and falling a little more each year. Teachers salaries move up slower than the cost of living. School maintenance is appalling. Buildings in so many schools are just falling apart.

(iii) Competing bureaucracies and politicians trying to leave their own stamp on education and who use the media to put almost all the faults of public schools down to teachers.

(iv) a media frenzy occurs whenever a hiccough (hiccup) anywhere takes place. Teachers who ask for clean, sound schools to work in and for salary rises that match the cost of living are called greedy. Teachers who ask for state and Federal moneys for adequate text books and resources are told to be creative.

(v) When I started teaching thirty years ago, senior tenured teachers in this state were paid 1.55 times the average male weekly full time wage/salary. Today I am a senior tenured teacher and I am paid 1.08 times the ratio. So senior teachers' buying power has fallen just over 30% over time. This also affects the retirement income which is based on the final salary earned.

My "administrivia" has gone from 7-10 hours per week in the late 1970s to over 25 hours every week. It is not unusual to have 12 or 13 weeks of the school year where I work in excess of 70 hours. And I am one of the teachers with good streamlining and time management skills.

Neither of my own kids is the least bit interested in this profession/career. They cite the level of commitment of my friends and me ... and the behaviour of students and parents as reasons that they would never do it.

And don't get me started on the way some people change when they are given assistant principal, principal or administrator jobs. Grrrr!

Thanks for reading as I vent my annoyance at 6:20 am on a Monday morning.

A couple of random thoughts - a kid expelled for writing threats in my school (but given a private tutor as he is special ed) is allowed to come back to play baseball. Another who, uh, repeatedly defecated on the rest room floors was booted last year (but given a private tutor so he could graduate - yup, special ed). Yesterday a girl told me of a kid threatening some shooting. I gave her my word I would pass it along without revealing her name (she was worried). Today I got the wordfrom the powers that be that I WOULD reveal her name. Bottom line, she also told another teacher who revealed her name, so it became a non-issue, but my word means something, so....

I want out!

I enjoyed reading these pieces. I rarely talk about teaching anymore, but the occasional chat like this is like a little emotional fix, quite therapeutic. I hate to think the total number of hours I have logged analysing the process of teaching. I wish you all well.-Ron

It has been more than four years since I was last at this site and this thread. I'll add a few more words, a sort of retrospective, on those years of teaching: 1967 to 2005.-Ron in Tasmania
------------------------------------
The book "The Education of Henry Adams"(1838-1918) --an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist--is much more a record of Adams's introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes of his lifetime: hence his need for self-education. The organizing thread of the book is how the "proper" schooling and other aspects of his youth, was time wasted. His autobiography is a description of his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.

"The Education of Henry Adams" purports to be the autobiography of Henry Adams(1838-1918). It in fact records the author's struggle, in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition of his work printed at his own expense. Commercial publication had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. I won't go into the comparisons and contrasts between my work and Adams of which there are many. I leave that to interested readers. But I will say, before moving on, that in the same way that Henry Adams' s life story is rooted in the 19th century American political aristocracy that emerged from the American Revolution, my story is rooted in the international Bahá’í community over a period of more than half a century(1953-2010), a community emerging from a spiritual, a global, revolution that had been initiated by two-prophetic figures, two-God-men in the nineteenth century.

The essence of this revolution was the search for the unifying agent, the unifying catalyst, that would help the planet survive the tempest of our times. The context for this search was an attachment to national, racial, cultural, class and political loyalties and an almost deafening withdrawal and apathy. The revolution of my time was out of human control; the process was giving birth to humanity, to a world community, a global society. My role was to help in the extension of the model of world fellowship that had emerged out of that spiritual revolution of the century preceding my birth, a model that had been born in Iran and in North America.

Adams' book became an important and influential one in literary non-fiction in the next hundred years. It ranked first on the Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 best non-fiction books. It spread throughout America and the world in the years, from a Baha'i perspective, after the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1919. The book is a useful comparison-contrast piece for me as I view my own autobiographical work. The comparison is a helkpful one to me personally, although not of much value as a comparison piece for contemporary readers. "Such is life," as Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the gallows in NSW Australia in 1880.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania---Australia's oldest town.
------------------------
ON WAR

When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete another kind of destruction will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble.-Henry Miller in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55.

Some of Carl Von Clausewitz’s(1817-1828) observations On War can be simply and easily applied in this new ‘far more drastic, far more terrible’ destruction. Some military strategists argue that his was the first written effort to systematize the principles of conflict. His essays appeared from 1817 to 1828 and were published in On War(Princeton UP, 1976). He said "everything in strategy is simple but not easy"(p.656) and "there is no higher or simpler law...than keeping one’s forces concentrated."(p.664). Both principles apply in this new style of war, but I must add the caveat that ‘forces’ are those that operate in the private theatre of one’s inner life. The advice for my contemporaries on dealing with this inner life is now massive, burgeoning, complex and will keep modern men and women as bust as beavers working it all out. -Ron Price, comment on Clausewitz’s collection of essays "On War."

After what we thought of as a superficial propriety
was given a good hard kick in the teeth by that
raucous rock-and-roll which woke us up from our
day dream of Mr Clean, Doris Day, General Ike,
with no negroes nor genitalia.....the war started.

I had just moved to Dundas at the time;
it was in a corner of the Golden Horseshoe.(1)
I call it pioneering now; that was back in '62
and the battle has been on ever since:
running across two continents, caught
in cross-fires that left me bleeding raw,
wounded, slowly recovered, found the right
prophylactic, taking it slowly now, walking,
hands in my pockets, watching fires burning,
harrowing up the souls of billions in an orgy of
violence, complexity, confusion, bewilderment
and often silent agony in lounge-rooms, bed-
rooms, kitchens, and classrooms across the land.

(1) The core of the Golden Horseshoe is the name given to the region which starts from Niagara Falls at the eastern end of the Niagara Peninsula and extends west, wrapping around the western end of Lake Ontario at Hamilton and then turning northeast to its anchor city Toronto (on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario), before finally terminating at Oshawa, just east of Toronto.

Ron Price
13 January 1996
(written with 3 years of full-time teaching left to go)

Note: there are two spelling errors in the above post, errors that this site provides no mechanism to correct. These errors are: (1) helkpful=helpful and (2) bust=busy. The English teacher in me required this correction; such is one of the leftovers from more than 50 years in classrooms(18 as a student and 35 as a teacher) as I head into these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as one model of human development in psychology calls the years from 60 to 80.-Ron