Every one of us had a teacher who changed something. Mine taught English in a room with a window unit that rattled all spring. She bought her own chalk. She stayed late with the boys who could not read yet, and she never once mentioned what she was paid. I do not know what she was paid. I do not think she wanted me to know.
I start there because we all agree on it. Teaching is not a job like other jobs. It is a calling, like preaching or nursing or the volunteer fire department. People do not go into it for the money. The good ones would do it for nothing. That is the part I want to take seriously.
If the good ones would do it for nothing, then every dollar we add above nothing is a dollar that attracts someone who would not. Raise the pay and you will get more applicants, I do not doubt it. But you will get them for the wrong reason. You will fill the classroom with people who are there for the check, and the children can tell. Children can always tell.
Think of the volunteer fire department in any small town. Nobody is paid. When the siren goes, the men who come running are the men who care. Now imagine you paid them well. You would have more men at the station. You would also never know, watching them run, which ones were running toward the fire and which ones were running toward the paycheck. The lack of money is how you know.
I keep hearing of teachers who have left, and of a principal I know of in the Hill Country spent all summer trying to fill a single opening. I do not know the numbers and I have not gone looking for them. But I will be honest about how I take it. I take it as a sorting. The ones who leave were not called. They were employed, and employment is a thinner thing than a calling. The ones who stay have proved something about themselves, and I would not want to insult them by offering them more.
People say a teacher should not have to work a second job in the summer. I say a teacher who works a second job in the summer is showing her students something no textbook can. She is showing them sacrifice. She is showing them that a person can love a thing enough to be poor for it. That is a lesson I am glad to have the state of Texas teach, and it costs us very little.
I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall with my old English teacher in mind. The other side, so far as I know, wants teachers paid better, and I would hate for the next one to have to wonder why she came.
Some year soon, I suppose, there will be a classroom with no teacher at all in it. The critics will point to it and say I told you so. I will point to it too, but for a different reason. Nobody in that room will be there for the money.
That has always been what I wanted.
D. M.