I am a teacher. I am not in a union. I live in a Right-to-work state. There are no unions here.
I am about to start my 18th year as a teacher. I am a veteran of the US Army. I have a STEM degree and worked for several years in a technical field before becoming a teacher. I love teaching more than any other job I have held.
I teach Honors Precalculus and AP Calculus. I teach at a school that is about 95% minorities. Maybe more than 95%. There are 1600 students at this school. I teach about 150 per year and I teach one or two white students per school year.
I arrive at about 6:15am give or take 15 minutes. There are rare exceptions. I have been absent from work 3 times in 17 years of teaching. I get home at about 5pm unless I have gate duty at an athletic event or PTO or something like that and then it can be much later.
I usually give students contact information when they graduate so that they can use me as a resource when they get to college and they get stuck. I spend quite a bit of time tutoring former students who take Calculus in college or who wait too long before taking their first math course etc.
My Precal students are tested at the end of the course and their growth is measured. A score from -2 to +2 is "meeting growth"and above +2 is "exceeded growth". The district average in the subjects that I teach is -3.6. My students averaged +21 for the 2019/2020 school year.
I did not want schools to be closed this past spring. A few weeks ago I got an email survey from the school board asking about returning to school. I want them to reopen on schedule. I am ready to go back.
I am not a liberal. I do not indoctrinate students. Many of my students respect my opinion and ask me questions that are not strictly related to my subjects. If they are political/social etc I will sometimes not answer but when I do answer I present facts from reputable sources which do not include mainstream media sites.
I have been thanked by parents more times than I can count. There have been times when parents came to the school over the summer to ensure that their child would be put into my class in the fall. I cannot imagine a higher compliment than for a parent to choose you to educate their child.
For this I am now entering my 18th school year and will earn a salary and supplement amounting to about 54.5k per year. I do get 8 weeks off in the summer. I also have to take "Continuing Education Classes" which occupies some of this time. I also have to pay for those classes.
This post is about "teacher unions" and the teachers represented by those unions. As such, it does not apply to me personally. However, I have read many posts disparaging teachers on this site. They typically do not differentiate between union and non-union teachers. To be fair, the vast majority of teachers I have worked with during my career are absolutely horrible and should not be paid as much as they earn. In a perfect world, they would be fired and replaced. Unfortunately that is not the world in which we live. There are, of course, a handful of teachers in every school who are working very hard to help.
The community in which I teach is an impoverished, minority community (I am white). If they closed the school where I work, most of these families, even with a federal voucher would not be able to educate their children. Virtually none of them could home school their children and which of them would teach their children AP Calculus? The best and brightest of these students (and they are very good) would never be educated to their full potential.
The problem is real but it is also complicated. The simple solution of firing teachers and issuing federal vouchers would be a disaster by itself.
You may want to give it a bit more thought.
Regards
I am a teacher. I am not in a union. I live in a Right-to-work state. There are no unions here.
I am about to start my 18th year as a teacher. I am a veteran. I have a STEM degree and worked for several years in a technical field before becoming a teacher. I love teaching more than any other job I have held.
I teach Honors Precalculus and AP Calculus. I teach at a school that is about 95% minorities. Maybe more than 95%. There are 1600 students at this school. I teach about 150 per year and I teach one or two white students per school year.
I arrive at about 6:15am give or take 15 minutes. There are rare exceptions. I have been absent from work 3 times in 17 years of teaching. I get home at about 5pm unless I have gate duty at an athletic event or PTO or something like that and then it can be much later.
I usually give students contact information when they graduate so that they can use me as a resource when they get to college and they get stuck. I spend quite a bit of time tutoring former students who take Calculus in college or who wait too long before taking their first math course etc.
My Precal students are tested at the end of the course and their growth is measured. A score from -2 to +2 is "meeting growth"and above +2 is "exceeded growth". The district average in the subjects that I teach is -3.6. My students averaged +21 for the 2019/2020 school year.
I did not want schools to be closed this past spring. A few weeks ago I got an email survey from the school board asking about returning to school. I want them to reopen on schedule. I am ready to go back.
I am not a liberal. I do not indoctrinate students. Many of my students respect my opinion and ask me questions that are not strictly related to my subjects. If they are political/social etc I will sometimes not answer but when I do answer I present facts from reputable sources which do not include mainstream media sites.
I have been thanked by parents more times than I can count. There have been times when parents came to the school over the summer to ensure that their child would be put into my class in the fall. I cannot imagine a higher compliment than for a parent to choose you to educate their child.
For this I am now entering my 18th school year and will earn a salary and supplement amounting to about 54.5k per year. I do get 8 weeks off in the summer. I also have to take "Continuing Education Classes" which uses some of this time. I also have to pay for those classes.
This post is about "teacher unions" and the teachers represented by those unions. As such, it does not apply to me personally. However, I have read many posts disparaging teachers on this site. They typically do not differentiate between union and non-union teachers. To be fair, the vast majority of teachers I have worked with during my career are absolutely horrible and should not be paid as much as they earn. In a perfect world, they would be fired and replaced. Unfortunately that is not the world in which we live. There are, of course, a handful of teachers in every school who are working very hard to help.
The community in which I teach is an impoverished, minority community (I am white). If they closed the school where I work, most of these families, even with a federal voucher would not be able to educate their children. Virtually none of them could home school their children and which of them would teach their children AP Calculus? The best and brightest of these students (and they are very good) would never be educated to their full potential.
The problem is real but it is also complicated. The simple solution of firing teachers and issuing federal vouchers would be a disaster by itself.
You may want to give it a bit more thought.
Regards