Her boots are the first to hit the ground

My wife is a teacher, an elementary grade educator; her boots are the first to hit the ground in America’s offensive to educate its young.

She arises at 5:30 each morning and is out the door and ready to receive busloads of second grade kids by 7:00. Many of these little bodies have not been fed, washed or have clean clothes. They stumble bleary eyed into class, small bundles of life----some have already known abuse and some have homes that have the ambience of a late night bar during a brawl. Little angels bound to the ground.

She returns home and tells me about the 40 pound kid that dumped a load in his pants, the parent that could not be reached at any phone number on file, the timid student teacher ( you must stare the children down or all 30 will bolt for the bathroom like gazelles), the kid that dropped Mr. Snowball the hamster ---cage and all-- in the floor during quiet time and the diva parent who expects the school system to raise her child and demands a conference of which the whining mother never shows up though teacher and principal waited a half hour past the appointed time. And I pour my wife a stiff diet coke on ice that she tosses down her throat, places the glass down on the kitchen counter and says “Hit me again.”

Public teaching is a divine calling and comes with much frustration. Sometimes she grits her teeth. The heat in the building did not work, she got a new kid that does not speak English and neither does the parents and she endures the ill-designed rating of schools that depend on a teacher’s performance judged by the whim of a child. Yet the teacher in her pushes on. Her complaints about pay are good natured; she loves her job, is paid a fraction of what she is worth yet maintains a high level of professionalism.

Professionalism in education is a world apart from mine: mine requires no more than a computer key board, a cocky attitude, a bag of pork skins and interesting underwear.

Three thoughts to all beleaguered teachers:
1.Remember, you are a professional. You are not a paper-pusher at Amalgamated Brooms. Before politicians began telling your profession how to teach, your predecessors built the framework for the world’s greatest country—America. Stand tall.

2.Hang out with other teachers. Never chum around with principals or administrators. They have their own agendas and crosses to bear. You can be nice but not fawning or subservient. Don’t gravitate there, don’t orbit.

3.Do not accept ugly remarks or rude behavior from parents passively. Stand up and leave the room or simply hang up on them if it’s a phone conversation. The problem in education is not lack of money, politicians (What!?) or global warming—its bad parents. Spoiled lazy parents are the enemy of education and when school boards find a legal way to treat them as such these over indulged narcissists will be put in their place and the respect for your profession will return.

Maybe in a hundred years from now teachers will be treated like a holy priestly order akin to the Illuminati or the Order of Melchizedek but in the mean time teachers will arise each day, wipe little noses, endure a myriad of naïve policies yet somehow pour knowledge into an impressionable little mind. And one teacher will come home, gulp down a diet coke on ice and say to her husband “They dropped Mr. Snowball today---cage and all.”