I SPOKE OUT for NC Teachers

Here I am doing my thing. My speech is below.

 

Teacher Stacy Eleczko giving us a glimpse into the life of a teacher.

 

Yevonne Brannon firing up the crowd in support of teachers.

 

My sons’ teachers spend more time with them each day than I do. Can you imagine the trust, respect, and faith it takes to drop off my kids each day at school? Can you imagine the immense responsibility these teachers have? Let me tell you, I have never left my sons at school with anything but gratitude and reverence for their teachers.

I am fed up with people who do not value teachers. Did these people not reach their station in life thanks to a teacher in some small (or large) way? I went to public school and private school. I attended a state public university and a private university for graduate school. My sons have gone to public school. I represented North Carolina as a delegate to Mom Congress. I think I bring a broad perspective to the education conversation.

My Latin teacher in ninth grade was outstanding. My older brother had Dr. Larrick too, and we both keep up with him on Facebook. He inspires us still. We marvel at what he taught us. Scratch that. We marvel at how he taught us. Latin, the dead language, came alive under the jovial, eager tutelage of Dr. Larrick. We developed a lifelong love of language in those classes. We both credit our good grades and knack for grammar and language in large part to the time spent in those Latin classes. Dr. Larrick was a public school teacher. My sons have had equally outstanding teachers in public school.

They have had some fantastic teachers who challenged them and saw sparks of hope and promise. When my older son struggled to read, his teacher refused to give up on him and more importantly, let him give up on himself. Her patience was saintly, and now this child is a voracious reader. A miracle indeed. My younger was timid and weary for the first several months of kindergarten. School was a major adjustment for him. His teacher, in tune with his nature yet never frustrated by it, encouraged him and made him feel safe. He eventually burst out of his shell and demonstrated remarkable academic prowess. She did more than teach my son how to read and count and write his name, she taught him to believe in himself. She gave him confidence. To this day, my sons name these teachers as their favorites and realize the debt they owe these women. My boys remarked at the dinner table the other night that it’s unfair teachers don’t get paid much while singers like Bruno Mars and football players get paid millions. “It should be the other way around!” they exclaimed. The children in our lives speak with unparalleled wisdom, no?

Sure, teachers come in all shapes and sizes. They come to the classroom from various states of zeal and happiness. Their paradigms are varied, and their perspectives are colored by experience, time, and the like. They are no different from any other profession. We have all had stellar and shoddy doctors, bosses, mechanics, contractors, tailors, flight attendants, lawyers, the list goes on… Why single out teachers?

Consider this:

What if your corporate job handed you a team of people you had no say in choosing? You are charged with teaching this team the fundamentals of XYZ in your industry. You have about six hours a day of instruction and you are the sole person teaching. You have few resources for materials. Your group is comprised of people who live with persistent hunger, people who have limited proficiency in English, people who have been sleeping in a shelter or in their car, people who are in pain but have no access to medical attention, people who have no money for books and basic materials, people who require special services, people who are singled out for being different, people who have attention deficit disorders, people who have come from illiterate families, people who cannot see but cannot afford eyeglasses, people who come from an abusive relationship, people who want the answers but don’t want to work. This is what a teacher is dealt.

Imagine being productive in an environment where you have little control and cannot impact the very basic needs that drive success under your watch. Now imagine you have to fight for every ounce of respect society doles out and every cent on your paycheck. Imagine you are judged solely on what your group can accomplish, with no regard to how hard you tried and how dedicated you were. Imagine the battle teachers face just to be valued, socially, professionally, and financially.

If you ask me, teachers should be at the top of the totem pole, for without them, we would be nothing. Everyone is so focused on her own kid that the collective greater good gets completely lost. If we harnessed the energy and goals of our community we would see all kids lifted up. But everyone staggers in the blindness of me-me-me.

There is an awful lot of energy spent trash talking to win elections rather than actually getting down to work to put more North Carolinians to work. At the core of finding stable work is a solid education. An educated community creates a safe, empowered, vibrant, stable community for us all. The children of today are going to be the ones caring for us and our world in the future. A disservice to them now will be a burden to us all later.

Teachers are first responders. We entrust our most cherished loves to these people, yet don’t trust them to lead, teach, nurture, and influence their own profession. We have bastardized this profession, putting profit over pupils. We have turned children into pawns that drive revenue streams. The tone we have taken as a state and as a nation to degrade teachers is deplorable. We should be ashamed. I leave you with this sentiment from M.R. Robinson, the founder of Scholastic:

“Few things are more important to society than finding ways to help teachers teach and help children learn.”

 

The inimitable Stacy Eleczko, the teacher who gave Bird the gift of reading.