Each year I teach five sections of high school English. That’s thirty (or more!) students in a room. That means that in my short career, I’ve already influenced almost 500 people directly! This doesn’t even include students I’ve taught in summer or night school, students who I mentor, have in my after-school club, or just smile at in the hall on a day when no one else did. Being a teacher is the most challenging thing I have done in my life; it is also the most rewarding. I can’t even fully describe it. Everyone always points to the moment when the kids “get it,” but it’s so much more than that. Kids teach you, too. They teach you how to be better parents, because you parent them when their parents don’t. They teach you how to be accountants, when you dig into your own pocketbook to buy them supplies or give them money for lunch. They teach you how to be lawyers, when you defend them to their peers or the school because they had a bad day unlike any bad day you or I will ever have. They teach you how to be doctors, too, when they come to you and tell you their most personal medical problems (seriously, that happens) and you have to decipher the level of care they will need (and often how they will get it). Sometimes, they even teach you how to be a MMA fighter when you have to break up a fight. And yet, the one thing they don’t teach you, the one thing my students haven’t taught me is why, despite the fact that I am all of those things to all of those students, I am mistreated by my district and the mayor of the city I was born and raised in and in which I work as a public servant. They can’t teach this to me because they don’t understand it either. As a teacher, I am vilified and my profession is denigrated by the mayor and his office’s media tactics. Last year, as my husband can verify, I cried more than I ever did.
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Fred Klonsky 
Thank you for posting this! I hope that more and more understand that teachers love students. We are doing this for them, too!
I loved teaching. Spent 30 years doing it. Most of it at CPS. Undergrad degree, second complete major, graduate degree, 45 graduate hours beyond my graduate degree, and I took all of that knowledge and experience, along with my personal energy everyday. I was thrilled with school reform and saw collegiality and educators being respected and included in decision making. Then it happened. The system was bought out. School reform was dismantled. Inch by inch it became a workplace of constant change, rules and policies that were clearly not thought out. Things I’d never experienced before. One teacher responsible for 50 first graders. Tasks that made no sense. Less and less time to plan; shortchanged moments with students, and a dismantling of things that did work into chaotic requirements that did not benefit my students. Our younger teachers were getting high blood pressure, sleeping problems and heath issues from anxiety and the overlord management scheme, and finally from overwork,
I could tell many stories of the sheer stupidity of the situation. More or less, the public education I received (elementary and high school, in CPS) is a system that has been bought out. A fine mess.
The last year I taught I fought to uphold my standards of teaching against every push against that idea. I left with my ideals, but just barely. Oh, and yes I cried seeing students each lunch out of coolers because we had no lunch room. I could barely see room to walk through the 8th grade room with 36 nearly full grown young adults. Never did i imagine seeing 6 classes together with two teachers for a weekly class. That was how we were ‘managing’. Do charters ever have any class this size?
I loved teaching. I truly did. I try to remember a time with less hysteria, fewer hiccups of change and instant policy issuances. I try to see a time where this madness will end without imagining a world without public education for all. Equally delivered to all neighborhoods, Where students are respected and teachers are given the opportunity to do their jobs without disrespect and rancor. I try to hope. It has been hard lately….
Teachers get into teaching to make a difference, to care about kids, to do the right thing. It is hard work with unbelievable, daily demands. Demands of children and parents are one thing. Demands from CPS “leaders,” people who have rarely even seen a child for longer than a sound byte, is quite another.
What good, for example, comes from testing a kindergartener or first grader for about one hour, individually, at the beginning of the school year? While the rest of the 32-36 children are – what? Coloring? None of the kids are taught anything for days or weeks while this testing, mandated by CPS, is completed by the classroom teacher. There is nothing in this testing that a good teacher could not surmise after a few days of regular lessons with the class and in small groups. But CPS needs to have its data so that the data administrators have something to do for the year. These types of demands are endless while most teachers teach IN SPITE of these CPS non-educational policies.
It is a sad commentary that the current mayor only has hateful, vitriolic things to say about teachers to the media and to the taxpayers of Chicago. (Teachers are evidently not taxpayers according to rahm.) Hopefully, the above teacher can transform her tears into constructive, militant protest against the current mayor and the current dysfunctional CPS board run by billionaires more concerned with breaking the union than with educating children.
And if rahm says one more time that CPS schools had the shortest school day/year in the country (or is it the world now?), I don’t know what I will do. He has NO idea about the history of CPS scheduling, all provided by CPS, not the CTU. He is a nasty piece of work. Nasty, nasty, nasty.