Why Teachers Are Not 'Those Who Can't'

As a Princeton graduate, I'm tired of being told I'm wasting my

degree. Don't our kids deserve the best? By Emily Moore
Newsweek, April 3, 2000 Naturally, I began teaching for the money. And the
prestige. Who wouldn't want to stand around at cocktail parties listening to
some puffed-up acquaintance on a six-month consulting stint drone "Yeah, I
mean teaching is great and all. But what will you do next?"

Shortly after completing my student teaching last fall, I applied for a summer
job outside the field of education. The interviewer lit a cigarette and reviewed
my resume. "Phillips Academy. Very good. Princeton! Good schools you've got.
Magna cum laude. Thesis prize. Teaching experience: English. Teaching?" She
looked up from the paper. "But you have such a good degree! Why waste it
teaching?"

I would like to say that nobody has asked me this before. That up until this
point, I've had no need to defend my ambition. The truth, of course, is bleaker.
So bleak that I am always ready with a response.

"Who would you rather have teaching your children?"

The interviewer sat back and took a long drag. "Well, I never thought of it like
that," she conceded.

We live in an age when people seem to lament the state of public education in
the same breath that they dismiss teachers as "those who can't." I cannot
count the number of times a well-meaning acquaintance has assured me that I
am qualified to do other things besides teach. That, by implication, I don't
have to teach.
In fact, I want to spend my life teaching. I love teaching. And ritzy degrees
aside, I don't think I will ever feel qualified to do it as well as I'd like.

I feel extraordinarily blessed to have been called to a profession in which I am

always learning. It is grueling, exciting, gratifying work. As a student teacher
in New Jersey last fall, I looked out at my high-school students and saw a field
of possibilities. I looked at their clunky boots and spiked hair and adored them.

Naturally, there were downsides. On bad days, I felt I was preaching to a

swarm of gnats. Yet as wretched as my students could be, it's been far more
distressing to be told by adults that I have wasted my degree.

There are notable exceptions. Fellow teachers have been nothing but kind,
witty and encouraging. Without a fiercely funny, intelligent mentor teacher who
believed in what she was doing, I never would have survived my student
teaching. Many parents with children in the public-school system are deeply
invested in recruiting and retaining gifted teachers. Yet there are people both
inside and outside this public-school culture who continue to wrestle with
assumptions about who is and isn't teaching, often arriving at troublesome
conclusions: that teachers are poorly educated, ill suited for high-powered
jobs, unwilling or unable to have more glamorous careers.

Though it is decidedly unglamorous—I spent all three months of my student

teaching exhausted and encrusted with chalk—teaching is deeply rewarding. In
my classroom, there was nothing more exciting to me than witnessing a
student write first a good sentence and then a good essay. Yet as victorious as
I felt when a student nailed down a provocative thesis, employed a stellar verb
or gracefully wove textual evidence into his or her paper, I was even more
gratified to hear that I had touched a student personally. "She was the only
teacher who didn't question my blue hair and understood the meaning of my
having it," one student wrote in an evaluation. "I think you will be a great
teacher someday," one of my more challenging students told me as I passed
back his essay, "because you always make me feel like I'm doing good." I look
forward to the day when teachers are as rewarded outside the classroom --
with both higher salaries and greater respect -- as they are within.

Students, not teachers, may be the greatest beneficiaries of increased respect

for educators. If insinuations that teachers are unqualified for other careers
upset educators, these notions alienate students. I remember one afternoon
proctoring in-school suspension. Eager to chat after a morning of enforced
silence, a tall, gangly boy asked: "You a student teacher?"

"Yes."

"Where from?" he inquired, his words reverberating off the dusty linoleum.

"Princeton," I responded.

"Princeton University?" he asked, flashing a broad smile. "Damn! What are you
doing here? I mean, you could have been like a doctor or a lawyer or
something!"

"I'm here because I want to be here," I said, smiling at his sudden animation.
"Don't you think you deserve good teachers?"

"You know I deserve only the best," a sullen boy in the far corner cracked,
raising his head up off the desk. As humorous as I found the moment, I could
not help wincing at his irony.

Moore, who recently received her New Jersey State Certification in Secondary
English, lives in New York.

© 2000 Newsweek, Inc.

Stint: a season (temporada)

Drone: noise (zumbido)

Bleaker: not nice (desolador)