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Schools For Scandal

They say that since Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came on, there's been a renewed thirst for knowledge in this country. It's kind of unfortunate though that Regis Philbin turns out to be the one who leads us to drink form teh fountain of wisdom, rather than some of the incredibly dedicated teachers in this country. I think we have a problem when the people we hire to be guards at school are making more than the teachers we pay to educate kids.

I think it speaks volumes about how little we value basic education in America that only one of the Three R's actually begins with the letter "R".

Teachers are said to have a high rat of stress and burnout. If you are a teacher, there are signs that you may be at risk. For example, if rather than try to remember the names of your students, you refer to them as "********." Or, more than once a week you find yourself saying, "Try me, dipshit." Or if you've invented a new game for your class called "Throw the Scissors Hard."

Nearly every high-school teacher falls into one of a handful of basic categories. There's Tough-but-Fair, who is universally feared and respected by the freaks and straights alike. Tough-but-Fair doesn't give much homework because he can't be bothered grading it, but at the start of each term assigns a reading list that would make Susan Sontag cry. Every few years, a student inevitably asks him why he's never written a book, whereupon the classroom grows uncomfortably silent while Tough-but-Fair clenches his jaw muscles and stares out the window for a long time, then mutters, "Guess I just never got around to do it," and gives a surprise quiz on the complete works of Thomas Pynchon. Nobody asks him a personal question ever again.

The next teacher type is Best Friend. Best Friend insists that you call her by her first name, and addresses the class as "People." She's everyone's favorite teacher, for teh obvious reason that her total lack of authority makes her an easy mark and also because her insistence that everyone move their chairs into a circle at the start of class is good for wasting at least half a period. If Best Friend knew what her students said about her behind her back, she would never stop crying.

My favorite teacher by though, is Tenure Jockey. Old, cranky, and shuffling. Tenure Jockey is permanently stooped, ground down by serving under decades of monolithic academic bureaucracy. He wears the same tweed jacket with suede patches at the elbows every single day and smells like cherry pipe tobacco and defeat. His Xeroxed handouts are always missing the top or bottom third of the page, and he hasn't altered his lesson plan since Huey Long was shot. And you know what the really frightening part is? When I was in Tenure Jockey's class, he seemed so old and decrepit, but he was probably younger than I am now.

Whatever types of teacher we're talking about, they all have one thing in common they are grossly underpaid. Somehow, we must convince all Americans that paying teachers what they deserve is as good an investment in out future as , say, building more prisons. Okay, maybe compensating teachers fairly is out of the question, when we know somebody loves to do something, we ******** them over on their paycheck, because we figure they're going to do it anyway. But at least keep what little we're giving them. I know I wouldn't be here if it weren't for dedicated teachers honing my mind to a keen edge, and I say they should pay no taxes. If you're a math teacher grossing $ 28,000 a year, and you have to pay zero percaent in taxes, that means your take-home pay is . . . Uhhh . . . Well, whatever it is, it's good.

Bottom linebeing with a teacher today is more challenging than doing bikini waxes on Russian women. You enter your place of employment by passing through a metal detector that's beeping like the Roadrunner with Tourette's syndrome, and then spend six hours a day trying to drill even a subatiomic-sized kernel of knowledge into the Dawson's Creek-and-Sony-Playstation-addled noggins of two dozen eye-rolling, world-weary, body-pierced felons-in-training who regard you with all the respect they would a stewardess on a spring-break charter flight to Cancun. And you know something? When you're not teaching kindergarden, it's even worse.