9486 in the collection
Former Corporate Executive: "I have never worked harder in my entire life than I do as a classroom teacher"
NOTE: Burlington voted "No" on school budget.
IT'S MY TURN: A teacher's-eye view of city schools
By Arnie Gundersen
I am a 54-year-old, newly minted Burlington High School math teacher and a Burlington resident. Prior to teaching, I spent more than 20 years in engineering, ultimately as the senior vice president of a major corporation. Through Vermont's rigorous "Alternate Route to Certification," I am now a certified math teacher. My job will be eliminated if the budget does not pass in May. Many of you have heard from the School Board and the teachers union and still voted no.
Forget statistics. Let me tell you what I see as a classroom teacher. New schools? None. To keep taxes low, our board has superbly maintained buildings in which three or more generations of Burlington families have been educated. No new tools, furniture or modern architecture. We use old textbooks that should be thrown out; we run out of classroom supplies by May, and broken calculators are not replaced. To minimize tax increases, the board has fought to hold the aging physical plant together by running a razor-thin budget for years. My engineering experience taught me that some day we will have to pay dearly for all this deferred maintenance.
The words "underpaid" and "teacher" have gone hand in hand since Socrates. Teachers don't teach to accumulate stock portfolios. Incredibly, there seems to be a mistaken belief that teachers don't work hard. I have never worked harder in my entire life than I do as a classroom teacher.
Recently, I read that teachers make a critical decision every 20 seconds -- it's true. Forget a stress-free, two-martini corporate lunch. I have only 22 minutes to eat and catch up on paperwork before my next class begins. It is a misconception that our honors classes are thinly populated while our remedial classes are stuffed full -- not true. My two remedial math classes are smaller than my pre-calculus class.
I teach 110 teenagers in five separate classes. Add in my study hall, and I see more than 130 kids each day. I chose Burlington because of its diverse student body, which makes teaching exciting and fun and also difficult and demanding. Nineteen percent of our student body lives below the poverty line; 32 languages are spoken in Burlington homes, and our teen pregnancy rate is three times higher than Vermont's average. Burlington's talented teaching staff still sends three out of every four students on to further education. Obviously, we're doing something right.
To remain certified, each one of us must take the equivalent of one college course each year. I personally hold a master's degree in nuclear physics, and most of my peers have enough credits to earn doctorate degrees, yet each of us earns less than $60,000 per year. If I had employees this motivated and dedicated when I was in industry, I would have had to double their salaries. Voters seem to have forgotten we teach less than 10 minutes away from districts whose teachers earn thousands of dollars more each year. . . .
— Arnie Gunderson
Burlington Free Press
April 10, 2003
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/bfpnews/editorial/3000h.htm
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
[1] 2 3 4 5 6 Next >> Last >>
