Television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes hit a nerve and struck a funny bone in the first week of COVID-19 stay-home orders when she tweeted, “Been homeschooling a 6-year-old and 8-year-old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.”
As someone who spent a nanosecond as a public school teacher, I had an itsy, bitsy bit of schadenfreude as I read the Twitter thread. I wanted to yell, “Now you get it!”
We all know the biggest heroes of COVID-19 are the doctors, nurses, aides and custodial workers staffing hospitals trying to keep us all alive. But coming in a close second are teachers who, in less than a week, turned the already difficult task of educating Arizona’s children into an online venture.
This sea change in educational delivery is happening at all levels, and I’ve watched in awe (virtually, of course) as University of Arizona professors traversed steep learning curves to create virtual classrooms and kindergarten teachers developed online circle times. Closer to home, I’ve observed my daughter, who teaches middle-and-high school French, work 10-hour days for two weeks straight to get everything done for her students — and still feel she wasn’t doing enough.
Her attitude is not unusual. Tell a teacher to lower his or her standards, and 99% of them just look at you — it just isn’t in them. And, like so many things, until you do the job yourself, you really don’t appreciate how hard it is, which is where many parents now find themselves.
So, if there’s any silver lining to the nightmare of a new virus racing across the globe, it might be this: That all of us finally grasp what teachers do and start rewarding them for it.
According to the Tucson Unified School District website, the starting salary for the 2019-2020 school year is $40,200.
Not too bad.
But after 15 years, that same teacher will only make $47,700 and the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that about one in every five teachers has to have a second job to make ends meet.
It is hardest for elementary school teachers because Arizona ranks 50th in pay for those classrooms. I’ve logged my fair share of volunteer hours in elementary school classrooms, and have argued for decades that K-5th grade teachers should start out at $55,000 if for no other reason that having to say, “Eyes up here” 4,382 times a day with a smile on your face takes superhuman power.
Public funding in Arizona will probably never provide adequate salaries for teachers. But I’m hoping parents currently stuck at home may be ready to fill in the gap. Having to explain subtraction the way you learned it 30 years ago to a 9-year-old screaming, “You’re doing it wrong!”, or tackling the herculean task of getting a 6-year-old to understand the difference between the “c” in “cat” and the one in “celery” tends to focus the mind like little else.
So here’s an idea for #Covid19Gratitude: Find an old jar, place it on your kitchen counter and start filling it up with the money you normally spend commuting to work, eating out for lunch or buying a $4 coffee on the way to the office.
Then, the next time you’re feeling trapped by what my son calls the “Great COVID Cloistering of 2020,” frustrated that you’re now a teacher as well as a parent, take a deep breath and go wash your hands.
Then, with those germ-free mitts, write a thank you to the teacher who normally helps your child learn to read, write, do math and, hopefully, become a decent citizen of the world.
Leave the envelope unsealed, so that a month from now when your child gets to return to school (fingers crossed, people!), you can write a check for the amount of money you’ve saved in the jar and include it with your thank you note.
You may be waiting for the silver lining of your life to return with your kids’ return to school, but you can be a teacher’s silver lining right now. Trust me, the good feeling you’ll get from this action will be worth it – and may be the only positive side effect you’ll get from Covid-19.
