Motivation:
During the second demo of the day, the question was raised by our lead facilitator Erin: What motivates our children to become better
students, better writers? As teachers quick to respond often do, we listed quite a few of tangible motivations for our students. The list listed money, free-time,
technology, real audience, choice, passion, relationships, self-regulation,
control, level of engagement, quality of instructor.
Quality
of instructor. That was the phrase that turned the course of
conversation away from our students and toward ourselves—our all too human
selves. Quality of instruction: That’s
me; that’s us. We’re here at SI to become even better—more efficacious—as instructors
of writing and reading and all things English. At SI, all in the name of
self-improvement, we tell our spouses and children “Leave me alone! I have
homework!"
Oh, the irony!
So what if our quality of instruction is negatively
affected by our lack of motivation? And what is it that motivates us? Well,
naturally, better pay and yearly increases in pay—I mean, Duke Energy goes up
every year, as does my City of Charlotte water bill, and my income and property
and sales taxes, and my medical and auto insurances. So when my pay is frozen 5
out of 6 years, that’s indirectly 5 years of taking a pay cut. And yet, there
are those who firmly believe that there was nothing done by me as a teacher
during those 5 years to merit an automatic 3% annual raise--in fact, I'm selfish to even think about or publicly request or legislatively supplicate a raise. Asking for a raise makes teachers the bad guy.
In addition to pay increases, teachers want respect
from all stakeholders, safe environments to teach, environments without the
disruption of malcontents, reasonable expectations of how many phone calls to
make a week, a reasonable amount of meetings to attend, and trust. As an homage
to A Few Good Men, what do Quite a Few Good Teachers say? “We use words like
honor, expectations, discipline, pride, loyalty, integrity—we use these words
as the backbone to a life spent teaching the unteachable and the lowly motivated.
You critics use 'em as a punchline.”
Thanks for that chestnut, Jack Nicholson. Sadly, teachers
are more than a joke; we’re also the punchline, the fall guy, the scapegoat of
all that ails education today.
The questions are simple: What must hard-working
teachers do to convince more of the public that cost-of-living-allowances
(COLA) should be a reasonable expectation for public servants? What can we do
to convince the public that it’s not about “job security” but about house and
car and apartment security? What can we do to convince people across this state
and this great nation that if our politicians can always find a way to increase
their salaries, even in recessions, even in the midst of stagnant job growth,
why can’t teachers get modest yearly raises--and daily positive affirmations,
and a permanent status as a valued employee in an honorable profession?
So yesterday, somewhere in there, somewhere in the
casual reference to "teachers need to be paid better," somewhere near the defiant
utterance of “I didn’t take a vow of poverty when I became a teacher,” a segue
was achieved where we, as SI participants, perhaps for the first time during
SI, actively, openly asked each other “What motivates us?”
The devaluing of the teaching profession at the hands of our lawmakers is scary...even scarier is hat the same moves being made in nc are being pushed through elsewhere, suggesting that there is more going on here then local level teacher bashing. Seeing some of the backpedaling that our leaders are doing now in the face of pressure from teachers and voters in an election year is assuring only in that it's an indication the public is more supportive of teachers and schools then we are led to believe. And with respect to motivation, I'm with you. Being treated as respected professionals is motivating for teachers, and pay is part of that respect.
ReplyDeleteWhat motivates me?... Let me introduce you to "Chip"; he lives on my shoulder. I can rage and rage but at the end of the day, our students are not responsible for the public's stupidity. They are not to blame for the fact that the public that has put them in our charge, largely views us as glorified babysitters or people who are in it for the summers until we can get a real job.
ReplyDeleteI admit it. I drank the Kool-Aid... although I'm tired of getting watered down food coloring as of late.
I believe we are at a crossroads. If you read the newspaper, it seems that quality educators have fallen into the category of myth like so many Hollywood caricatures. We’ve all seen the movies. They’re all great stories. But the implication is that quality teachers are an anomaly; that they are mavericks who somehow rise above the broken system of indifference and cynicism. This is the perception of education that permeates our national consciousness; that most of us are under-qualified, overpaid, coddled, subversive; the attacks from politicians who attack us directly or indirectly; the public votes of no-confidence, all working against us and our students. Decisions are made by individuals who have never taught in a classroom and in many cases have never attended public schools. Regardless of what label we use, current education policy in this state and frankly in our nation, is not about educating children. We as a society have allowed this to happen. We have constructed a system which devalues educators and reduces our children as figures on a ledger. Education must not be simply about the acquisition of letters and numbers but about being a pathway to a greater society. But instead, we have reduced our children to numbers on a spreadsheet and qualified graduation rates because developing people takes too long and doesn’t win elections. Scholarship is what is truly meaningful and statistics can be made to mean what you want them to mean.