Home » Film, TV, & Pop Culture » Music Education » Articles » Over worked and under paid, but that's not the problem!

Over worked and under paid, but that's not the problem!

Deborah Jeter

As educators, we are encouraged to think about new and better ways to educate our students. If you are a fairly new teacher with five years of experience and under, then you are probably still gung-ho and reved up, full of energy and enthusiasm. But for those of us that have been around for a while, we've seen the decline of student interest and a decline in respect toward elders as well as a decline of support from our own government.

WARNING:This is my annual "sound off" article.

So much complaining goes on around the US that the teachers are the ones to blame for the increase of illiterate grads and for the dropout rate. I have always maintained that many of the parents aren't teaching their kids the respect and the manners toward authority figures that I was taught in my boomer's generation. Many of the parents don't seem to be as strict with their children. They simply expect their children to do the things necessary to succeed without spending the time and energy to teach them what those things are.

The simple fact is that since the early eighties, the lower classes' income has been robbed from the poor and given to the rich (something wrong with this picture?) and many families now have both parents, (if there are two parents in the family) working, which leaves the children with less parental rearing. Either the parents are physically absent or at least, mentally absent, due to exhaustion. Who's raising the children?

OK, before you feel like writing me a "flame" letter or "giving me a piece of your mind," I took my thoughts in a different direction about the whole situation in education on my drive home today. Maybe teachers ARE partly to blame.

Hear me out on this one. Twenty years ago, my tone, my manners, my patience were softer, better and longer, than they appear to be today. Have I become jaded right along with all the rest?

I know that the expectations set upon job performance have increased for me and the pressures haven't made me a better teacher, it's made me a pressured teacher, that feels the stress and strain of those expectations. Being an artist, stress and pressure stifle my creativity.

I have always thought the government would take care of their service oriented people. I mean, we as teachers are servants. Now, it appears that only the rich will truly be taken care of and the rest of us will have to get what we can, however we can.