Where have all the teachers gone?

Ahh ... it's late April in Texas. The rain has come, the wildflowers are in bloom, and for those of you who don't know, school districts all across the state are having job fairs so that they can hire soon to be ex-teachers.

Yeah, it's cynical, but it's also true. Trust me about this, I'm an ex-teacher. Oh, and if something about pay just popped into your head, you're most probably off base.

The thing is, unless you teach at a private school or in a really small town, you probably do OK as far as dollars go. Here in San Antonio, the starting pay for the average teacher is around $40,000. That's not yacht in the Caribbean money, but when you figure that you only work 187 days a year, it's not bad.

Seeing as how there are many different aspects to this topic it would be easy to write an overly long post, so in the interest of pithiness, I'm going to keep it short and just say a few words about a couple of things the first-year teacher will be hit in the face with.

When people are people are planning a teaching career, they tend to naively think that most their time as a teacher will be spent teaching. Poor fools. They won't be a week into the job when they discover that they're spending a lot (and I mean a pick-up truck full) of time on discipline issues and on BS classroom activities that are designed to keep students relatively quiet and relatively well behaved.

Believe me when I say that as a teacher, your ability to communicate complex ideas or lessons in an easily understandable form to students ranks a distant second to your ability to keep students quiet and in their seats.

Another thing that makes new teachers become former teachers is that they have responsibility without authority. In case you can't quite grasp this concept, this is the same thing as playing poker and only being able to bluff. If another player calls your bluff, you lose a stack of chips; if the other player knows that ALL you do is bluff, you lose all of your chips.

The bottom line is, if the kids ever find out you're bluffing, you're in for pure hell the rest of the year, and the sad part is, they almost always find out that new teachers are bluffing.

So who wants to work at a job where you don't do what you were trained to do, and where 11 and 12 year-olds can run roughshod over you? The sad fact of the matter is next to no one, that's who.