What do teachers make?

[asterroc]

Yoinked from kobold.

Comments

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I make adults who were high school dropouts, teen mothers and the children of teen parents, druggies, alcoholics, learning or physically handicapped, infantry in Iraq, or homeless, into employable, responsible, knowledgeable citizens.

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

My suggestion is to revisit this as it gets closer to late August/early September to really invigorate yourself.

When other people get fired up about something I agree with, I generally tend to follow suit (: (It's June, and that means it's almost halfway to MITMH2K8! Can you dig it? ::grin:: )

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Fuck revisiting this when Fall starts, this is my motivator NOW to go out and research the 2008 Presdential candidates' stances on education, and then proselytize for the best one. You can make a difference. Your vote counts, and it counts even more when you tell friends and family and coworkers how you're voting and why, and more still when you get people who wouldn't vote otherwise to go to the polls.

My teacher's union is one of the forces that got Governor Patrick into office, and now he's working on making public higher education FREE. This is the power of people. Go out there and spread the word about what is important to you.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. That's *awesome*. Bless that man for having all that fire. I hope that everyone listening to him got a tall glass of ass-kicking affirmation.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I don't just want teachers in need of affirmation listening to it, or even people who don't teach but like teachers.

I want your everyman on the street listening to it, who wonders why teachers do such a thankless job for so little pay.

I want politicians listening to it as they decide that high-stakes standardized testing will make citizens out of children, and as they decide that high-stakes standardized testing judges a teacher's ability rather than her district's funding, and as they decide what that district's funding is going to be and therefore decide whether the teacher has a job and the student has a chance.

I want YOU listening to that and reading this, and everyone we know, as we go into the primaries and approach the day we can stand in front of the machine or bubble sheet and tell the rest of the nation and the world that THIS is who we believe in to lead this country and determine the fate of all our people.

[rumorofrain.livejournal.com]

That f***ing rocks. Thanks for posting it.

Having a friend attending a prestigious law school, I can honestly say that I don't think more than 1% of people who become lawyers do it because they want to make a difference in the world.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many education support staff do it because they want to make a difference in the world. Only this year has it really started to dawn upon me just how essential the many support staff are, and how helpless we teachers would be without them.

[rumorofrain.livejournal.com]

::grin:: Aw, you know how to make a girl smile. :)

I was training some students on how to support our classroom technology today, and I reassured them that our in-room systems are very easy to use. "We designed them so that faculty could use them," I said. They laughed, but then I elaborated that faculty already have more-than-full-time jobs teaching, so it would be unfair to expect them to spend even more time learning about technology. That's our job. That's why we work to make technology easy to use, and to make the system for getting what they need as transparent and flawless as possible.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I elaborated that faculty already have more-than-full-time jobs teaching

Even though I had a high school teacher for a mother, I didn't fully appreciate this until I taught full-time myself. Sure we "get summers off," but you know what I'm doing with mine? Professional development (learning differential calculus w/ my old roommate jethereal), cleaning and maintaining the lab (lab techs should be doing this but we don't have enough), fighting IT for computers that aren't 8+ year-old hand-me-downs, picking a new textbook, revising course syllabi yet again, learning how to teach w/ WebCT, and possibly working on a NASA grant (if they ever tell me whether I got it or not, but last year they funded around 2/3 of applicants and our grants officer told me mine was really good). That's "relaxation" for me.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

OK, ok, you win.

I've been resisting expanding my LJ friends list so that I wouldn't spend _too_ much time keeping up with it...but if I hadn't followed a vagrant impulse to check out your journal for No Readily Apparent Reason, I would have missed this. And that would have been a damned shame.

So I'm adding you. Thank you for this. :)

(Yes, I know that you never asked and this wasn't a contest. It's all me. But you won anyway, at least in the "zandperl FTW!" sense.)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Heh. :) Thanks.

I've been resisting expanding my LJ friends list so that I wouldn't spend _too_ much time keeping up with it...

I know what you mean, I've been thinking of trimming mine lately, or at least starting to use the friends filters for reading it, rather than only for filtering which of my posts people can see. No offense taken either way. I think people take this whole LJ friends thing way too seriously. :-P

FYI, if you care about teacher-y things, I have another blog syndicated at modern_science where I talk (nearly) exclusively about academia and science issues, and many of the unlocked posts I have here on those subjects I crosspost there. I.e., it's possible that blog would be more interesting to you than this one, and I post there less often, but then you would miss out on the locked posts I have here, and the conversation that's more likely to happen here. It's your call, and it doesn't much matter to me either way, but I thought I'd point it out in case it'd help shorten your friendslist reading.