Another Eulogy for the Teaching Profession.

In their successful bid to tear down societal progress made by the American people, the Republican Tea Party destroyed an entire profession, all because they were taxpayer supported "public" employees.

We are now relegated to stories like the following, in praise of those special teachers who turned us completely around. It's also true that those same teachers did little or nothing for our other classmates. 

NY Times-Charles Blow’s Op-Ed, In Honor of Teachers

I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a society wide failure.

A March report by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of the differences between the United States and countries with high-performing school systems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world’s best-performing economies.” High school teachers in the U.S. work longer hours (approximately 50 hours), and yet the U.S. devotes a far lower proportion than the average O.E.C.D. country does to teacher salaries. A 2005 National Education Association report; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as the chief reason.

Take Wisconsin, for instance, where a new law stripped teachers of collective bargaining rights and forced them to pay more for benefits … “about twice as many public schoolteachers decided to hang it up in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years.”

I was not a great student. My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarily placed in the “slow” class. I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs. Thomas’s class. On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz … I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test — first. “Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.” She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind of eyes that warmed you on the inside. She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of them right.

I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way. It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad grade again. I figured that Mrs. Thomas would always be able to see me if I always shined. I always wanted to make her as proud of me as she seemed to be that day. And, she always was. I went on to graduate as the valedictorian of my class.

And all of that was because of Mrs. Thomas, the firecracker of a teacher who first saw me and smiled with the smile that warmed me on the inside. So to all of the Mrs. Thomas’ out there, all the teachers struggling to reach lost children like I was once, I just want to say thank you. You deserve our admiration, not our contempt.