Insult or Injury?

I was a public school teacher for the better part of a decade.

I left teaching to become a lawyer. People often ask me why, and I've settled on a fairly simple answer: a profession should be rewarding, either personally or financially. Teaching wasn't.

It wasn't personally rewarding for me. I could enumerate specific reasons, but this is not long-form writing . . . it would take too long. Simply put, teaching ceased to be personally rewarding because seemingly everyone, from the President to the Governor to my students' parents to my students themselves, expected me to care more about my students than any of them, including their own parents and indeed themselves. The old meme about "Welcome to teaching, where the pay sucks and everything is your fault" rings very true.

As to the finances, I'm fairly certain plenty has been written about that already. I tend to hear people who've never taught talk about how easy teachers have it; that's a crock of $hit. Anyone making such a claim is hereby challenged to (1) get licensed; (2) teach every day for a year; (3) live on a teaching salary for a year; and (4) continue talking about how easy teaching is.

As I've noted before, I am a civil litigator. I have tried cases that could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in judgments against my clients, bankrupting their businesses and ruining their lives. Particularly when weighed against the annual income, the total stress of litigating doesn't outweigh the total stress of teaching by much.

Anyway, this is all a lead-up to the "insult to injury" email I got from Sen. Do-Nothing Government-Funded-Lawyer/Lobbyist Michael Young. Sen. Young, having voted to hamstring teachers' ability to collectively bargain for better wages, having voted to make school funding a statewide issue (so that it can be underfunded), having voted to wrench local control away from schools, now has the brass to send an email to me about Scholarships for Future Educators.

How about this Sen. Young? Maybe, instead of throwing paltry scholarships at prospective educators, you treat current educators with the same respect you would treat opposing counsel? Maybe you acknowledge that their jobs are difficult and valuable? Perhaps you acknowledge that teaching is not a hobby but a profession, and that requires actually paying people. Maybe you can acknowledge that for decades, society has been getting teachers at a cut rate because their labor is undervalued as "womens' work" as opposed to the "manly" work of construction or factory work (both of which pay better, I might add, and construction allows its seasonally laid off employees to collect unemployment; teaching? not so much).

Simply put Sen. Young, perhaps you could acknowledge that there is a large swath of society that actually makes money by working instead of trading off connections to do stuff like be a lobbyist, get elected to the state legislature, or get your law school tuition paid.l