It is both a privilege and a pleasure to be a high school English teacher!
Our challenge is to bring out the latent creative abilities in young people. Moving adolescents to read, write, listen, speak, and think can be accomplished through a myriad of methods. There are no limits to what a motivated, enthusiastic educator can help students accomplish with a little imagination and a variety of literature.
I’ve always pitied my colleagues whose content areas are more concrete. Take math, for example. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division never change. The same goes for algebra; 2X plus 2X has always been 4X, just as 2X times 2X will always be 4X squared. The angles of a triangle will forever add up to 180 degrees, the diameter of a circle is always twice the radius, and sines, cosines, and secants remain the same as they were back when I was in high school myself not paying attention, and thus failing to grasp their alleged significance.
None of that information is secret, but here’s something that is: we public educators are compensated far more equitably than many people suspect. I realized that at the tail end of last month when I reconciled my 2018 finances and found my checking account had a significant surplus!
Naturally there are some extenuating circumstances. I don’t own a television, and thus don’t pay cable bills. The $2,000-per-column fee I get from the Journal Tribune makes an impact, as does the $500 monthly rent I charge each of my children. (I feed the 13-year-old for free, but the older ones pay extra for that.) Still, seeing a black, four-digit bottom line was nothing short of shocking. When I double-checked the accounting, everything was accurate. I’m square with the mortgage, power, phone, internet, and water companies. I made every car payment on time, and my taxes are paid in full.
Ecstatic over this unexpected windfall, I quickly returned to reality after a brief period of elation. While it was tempting to arrange a cruise down the Nile, a swim with turtles off the Galapagos Islands, or a flight to Australia to find out if the little whirlpool really does spin backward when the toilet’s flushed, I couldn’t in good conscience spend the entire bonanza on myself.
But it took two famous philosophers to remind me you can’t take it with you, either. Denzel Washington observed in his graduation speech to Dillard University’s Class of 2015, “You’ll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse.” And Sir Thomas Browne, who to my knowledge never penned anything I’ve ever disagreed with, wrote (in 1642), “Charity begins at home.” Thus inspired, I decided to spread my good fortune around locally.
The food bank received a donation; its very existence should remind those of us who aren’t food insecure just how fortunate we are. And given the current importance of encouraging reading (and the love of it) in the young, I lavished money on a quartet of libraries: two near where I live, and another pair located in the district where I teach.
I also made a donation to Maine Public Broadcasting, which may seem counterintuitive, given my TV-lessness. But they provide an important service. They also produce and broadcast “Maine High School Bowl” every winter. Modeled after “College Bowl,” a student quiz show that was nationally televised for twelve years (on CBS from 1959-1963 and on NBC from 1963-1970), the Maine Public version features teams of six students from sixteen different Maine high schools in a single-elimination tournament that tests both the youthful contestants’ ability to recall knowledge quickly and their coolness under fire. Because the episodes are filmed in advance I had a chance to witness a taping of the program last month, and what goes on behind the scenes is fascinating.
In the interest of full disclosure, and to reassure readers I am not a creepy, middle-aged weirdo who goes to TV studios just to sit around looking at bunches of random juveniles, I am compelled to acknowledge that one of my offspring is on one of the teams participating in “Maine High School Bowl” this year. I’m sworn to secrecy about what transpired on the show I saw pre-recorded, but……well, while I still won’t purchase a television, I do plan on visiting someone who’s got one once I find out exactly when the program airs.
Writing all those checks to deserving organizations reminded me it truly is better to give than to receive; nothing beats the feeling of helping others. The warm feeling all that altruism gave me didn’t wear off until last week, when I learned my checking account was overdrawn. By a lot.
Stupid decimal points. Maybe I should have paid better attention in those Math classes.
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