How the school district makes me feel

Dear Teacher,

Thank you for giving 110% of yourself to your job. Thank you for coming in early to set up your classroom and lesson plans for the day. Thank you for staying after school to tutor struggling students or lead extracurricular clubs and events to enrich students’ lives. Thank you for coming in on your days off even though you know full well you won’t be paid for it. Thank you for dragging home children’s books, piles of papers to grade, lamination and crafts to cut, etc. and persuading your loving family to help you with numerous school projects on evenings and weekends. Thank you for writing sub plans when you are deathly ill and coming in anyway when you feel crappy. Thank you for being exposed to billions of little germs on dirty hands and snotty noses and sneezes that do not get covered. Thank you for spending your paycheck on dry erase markers, glue sticks, hand sanitizer, stickers, prizes, posters and countless supplies from specialty (expensive) teacher stores. Thank you for attending meetings, professional development and advancing your degree over holiday breaks. Thank you for putting up with overprotective, ornery, permissive, inattentive, hovering, angry and at times wonderfully helpful parents. Thank you for wearing numerous hats and making countless decisions every day- you are a social worker, nurse, public relations officer, performer, actor, diplomat, and a mom to 20-40 children every day who constantly demand your attention and request your guidance.

We realize that most of the world thinks you have it easy. Those who can’t, teach, right? We recognize that people commonly assume teachers work 8-2 September-May and “isn’t it fun to be with kids all day?” We would like to recognize your accomplishments, and the fact that most people could not survive 1 day doing what you do every day.

However, we would like to clearly make it known that all of your dedication amounts to nothing more than a statistic. We have been looking at our test scores from last year (poor performance is your fault by the way) and our enrollment for next year. Because after all, the lives of children who will be our nation’s future are nothing but numbers to us. Numbers followed by dollar signs, all in red (their test scores are red too). Therefore, we would like to inform you that you are not needed here. We may or may not feel the need to call you up on an arbitrary day (while you are teaching) sometime within the next 7 months and offer you a random job out of nowhere that you must take otherwise you have officially resigned from our district and we will promptly disown you. “You teach preschool? Now you can go teach 8^th grade math. It’ll be fine; all teaching is basically the same right?”  Never mind the fact that it takes 3 good years to get proficient at teaching one grade level/subject area. (Imagine if we did this to doctors. Foot doctor, you are fired, now go do heart surgery…) We can get away with this because we know at the heart of it you care about children’s futures, and society needs teachers, as much as we like to pretend we don’t.

Now go back in there and do it all over again tomorrow.

Sincerely,

               Your employers

                              The school district