What follows is a specific contrast to TeacherToni’s excellent diary on teachers’ unions…with my thanks for all of the excellent series on unions.

Before the beginning

Teaching is one of our family curses.
I don’t really know how far back the teachers go, but our 10th great-grandfather, who died in 1629, was a historian, geographer and teacher. All my siblings became teachers, and both parents were teachers.

Being born, raised, and nurtured in strong, anti-union Republicanism is another family curse.
The first time I uttered a profanity in the presence of my parents without being punished was to announce at the supper table when I was 6 that we had to do something about these goddam unions! I had just read some anti-union editorial in a magazine or newspaper, and I was revved up with political furor, another family curse. My parents fell out laughing and miraculously, they weren’t mad! Being against unions was great!

Of course, where we lived, there wasn’t a union in sight. Some years later, my older sister slipped into apostasy, and became a union rep and eventually a fulltime union organizer for one of the national teachers’ unions in a western city. My parents were deeply ambivalent, but they had begun to see some cracks in the family occupation. My dad couldn’t support our family on a teacher’s salary, and he had left teaching, returning to it only when he retired from a job he really didn’t like.

Still, they were pleased when I began teaching, and they happily discussed the high salaries that teachers got in my sister’s school district. My dad insisted this had nothing to do with being unionized, and assured me I’d get good pay also. He didn’t have a clue.
The Beginning
I was hired in a Texas city that had never even thought of unions of any kind without attaching “evil” or “communist” in the front of the term. During the orientation for new teachers, we had a session with the Superintendent. for Instruction. This man was a legend in that part of Texas, evoking love and fear in many teachers I knew. His talk was labeled The Secret to Being a Great Teacher.

What was the secret?  I had to know. Various possibilities ran through my head as we waited:  Love of learning? Understanding kids? Hard work? Perseverance?  No.

“The secret to being a great teacher,” he said, “is LOYALTY.”

Loyalty?? Surely I had heard wrong.Loyalty?? OK, sure, to the kids, to learning, to knowledge, to. .  No.

” Great teachers are loyal to this school district, and to your school. This means you never criticize. Never complain, never listen to complaints. Defend your schools. If you see a problem, keep quiet. Wiser heads will take care of things. Your number one job as a teacher is your LOYALTY.”

I almost expected him to break out into Be True to Your School

The Reality
School started at 8:30am, but children came in the room beginning at 8. However, we were not to teach them between 8 and 8:30, lest any child be “left behind”. We were in charge of our children all day long. All day means, in this case, ALL day. No breaks. None. We ate with our students. We went with our students to the school library and to the music teacher and to the restrooms.  Our school didn’t have recess, but we did have P.E. – 20 minutes a day. My classes had P.E. first thing, 8:40 to 9am. I had to march them down the hill to the gym, and then pick them back up promptly at 5 minutes till 9 so the next set of classes wouldn’t get in our way walking back to the room.  For the first two years I taught, that 20 minutes was as much of a planning period or break that I had.

Lunch was 17 minutes, door-to-door, meaning from leaving my room to coming back to my room we had exactly 17 minutes. Teachers ate at the tables with their students, no exceptions. We could not leave the cafeteria for any reason while our students were eating. Most of the teachers in my school had kidney infections. I was quickly advised not to drink anything at lunch, because I’d have to take my entire class to the restroom with me.

Our Superintendent was a former football coach – a common qualification in Texas. He demanded complete obedience from his “team”, and sent out memos telling us if there was any policy we didn’t like, that the roads out of town ran north, south, east, and west. The second year I taught, he lengthened the school day 45 minutes. In the third  year, he decreed that schools would open at 7:30am rather than 8, so kids could come in to our rooms for one hour before we began teaching. Teachers had no input into these decisions, and he threatened to fire the committee who politely protested these changes.

We were given a standard calendar and were expected to be on the same page in the same textbook in every class in the same grade throughout the city. Two teachers in my school who were found “off calendar” twice had their art paper and supplies confiscated as punishment. One reaction to this was to go along with the standard lessons, which were terrible. Other teachers became adept at “Plan B”, my personal creation. This consisted of a signal that we passed quickly from room to room when an inspection was being held, giving the far rooms enough time to get out the required lesson for the hour. We kept the “official stuff” at the ready at all times, and could switch over at a moment’s notice.

I remember some requirements with real fondness.  A new member of the School Board was a prominent local dentist. His wife, head of the Dental Auxiliary (do they still have those clubs?) got the Sup to make another decree:  All elementary grade children would be issued toothbrushes and personal toothpaste tubes. Everyday, we were to have all children brush their teeth when they arrived at school, and do this again right after lunch.  With 38 children in my classroom, this decree, if followed, would have taken up most of the morning and afternoon.  Oh, and the mess, of course, that was to be the teachers’ responsibility. Children could not clean sinks because of health regulations.  Our custodians only scrubbed out our classroom sink once every couple of weeks, if then.  If this seems like no big deal to any of you, I’m sure some folks here with multiple children – Second Nature? Cabin Girl?  – might be able to help you “see the light

Our pay scale was based on experience and education, just as almost every district’s teacher pay is today. I was on a higher pay scale because I had a Master’s degree. My first year’s salary was $16,402 in today’s dollars. Over the next two years we got “big raises” from the state legislature, so my pay went to $17807; and $20,543 (today’s dollars). My other benefits included 5 days of sick leave per year, which would not accumulate if I didn’t use them, until I’d been with the district for 5 years. I got one personal day off. (This required proof of good purpose. When my uncle, my father’s half-brother, died, my principal made me re-write the section in which I had to describe my exact relationship with the deceased.  Half-relatives were likely to be turned down, and I’d be docked a day’s pay.).  I had health insurance, which at that time was not terribly costly, and 2 percent of my pay was deducted for retirement, unmatched by the district or state.  I was not tenured, and could be dismissed without any due process, at the request of my Principal.  

My contract also had a morals clause. I could be fired for engaging in “acts deemed unsuitable to persons of high repute”. This included having to obey all of the laws of the county, which was dry, everywhere I went. Drinking alcohol in public, even outside the county, was very risky.  The “unsuitable acts” clause was invoked more often that you might think.  When the students in our county were taking their first day of standardized NCLB-type tests, the fire alarm went off in the middle of a complicated set of instructions. A third grade teacher with 15 years experience burst out with “Oh Shit!!” in front of her students, and she was summarily fired.

She didn’t even make it to lunch.