Sunday is Teacher Appreciation Day at Dodger Stadium. So, my family and educators attended the game against the Cincinnati Reds at Chavez Canyon. (My youngest son took home Shohei Ohtani’s foul ball, a souvenir that easily offset the high ticket price.)
But my wife couldn’t make it to Thanksgiving. Because she is a teacher. Teachers often work on Sundays.
Summer vacation is right around the corner, but there’s no soft landing during the school year.
This personal irony neatly illustrates the unique way we treat our teachers. On the one hand, their high status in society is unquestionable: politicians seek their support, polls show Americans trust them more than most other classes of workers, and the Dodgers give paying fans an annual tumbler or sweater Apples are engraved in their honor.
On the other hand, I saw a hidden reality in my 15-year marriage to my teacher:
After passing out from exhaustion the night before, an iPhone alert sounds at 4 a.m. to resume class preparation. Endless exam writing and grading. The heartbreaking feeling is that if a student disobeys in class or performs below expectations, it’s the teacher’s fault.
This is a job that is done roughly equally inside and outside the classroom. Everyone envies what they see—the 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. weekdays and summer vacations—without realizing that in order to make their children’s education look easy, they spend their mornings, evenings, and weekends Spend countless hours away from your children.
You don’t have to be married to a teacher to understand the psychological ramifications of it all. While burnout plagues workers in all occupations, a 2022 Gallup poll found that The biggest blow to teachers. Study shows teacher burnout associated with poorer student achievementand According to education news website ChalkbeatStates that track school turnover (California is not one of them) report that educator turnover has hit record highs in recent years.
I see symptoms of this upheaval all the time, often in the annual soul-searching sessions of my teacher friends to see if they can handle another year like this. These people are not in it for summer vacation or museum discounts.
But most do eventually return to the classroom, so it’s worth asking: What’s sustaining them? What brings them back?
I have an idea, and while my sample size is small by research standards, it provides a wealth of anecdotal evidence.
My wife and her two sisters teach, their mother is a retired teacher, and their late grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District when it was called the Los Angeles City School District. Jokes and abbreviations (god, there are endless abbreviations) from the education world filled our conversations.
And, of course, teachers who read The Times (and sometimes even their students) Write letters to the editor Revealing realities within the classroom.
Here’s what I gleaned from all of this: For every challenging administrator or parent, there are at least 10 students who respect their teachers, or at least act like they understand how much effort it all takes. For many students, people like my wife and her sisters are the most important adults in their lives—not exactly surrogate parents, but in a way that is essential and only compassionate , only well-trained educators can do this.
So the work itself may be satisfying, but material support from other parts of society – rather than the kind of attention-grabbing, empty praise already given – is not enough. We could certainly pay teachers more (because nothing fights burnout like a fatter salary), but for most districts, that’s not possible given California’s budget deficit estimates for the next two fiscal years to US$56 billion.
Here’s another, unrelated-sounding approach: We could build a lot of housing, and then build more. With starting salaries around $60,000 per year, new teachers can forget about renting their own apartment in Los Angeles, let alone living near school. If we solved the housing shortage, it might be feasible to make ends meet on a young teacher’s salary.
But these are long-term solutions. If you’re interested in showing your appreciation for a teacher’s work and understanding of their plight, here’s a tip: Don’t tell them how great their life must be because they’re about to take the summer off.
