Teachers in a number of states have staged walkouts, and others are striking at the state capitol.  They’re asking for increases in pay, increases in funding so that their students can have books printed more recently than 1950 that have all the pages in them, chairs that aren’t broken, tables that don’t require a book be placed under one or more legs, and basic supplies that are needed to do their jobs.  Opinion pieces have shown up online and in local papers both in support of teachers and chastising them for being greedy.

I got to thinking yesterday after I read one piece in our local paper that was less than supportive of teachers as a whole, but was incredibly angry that teachers are asking for anything at all.  What is it that we value as a society when it comes to education?  How do we show that we value a particular profession?

Teachers in multiple states are among the lowest paid of any profession in those states.  I’ve seen several reports of what full-time teacher’s monthly paychecks look like, and it’s dismal.  One was roughly $700.  Another $1100.  Some teachers have more than one additional job to help support themselves and their family and are humiliated when they run into their students and families while working those other jobs. Not because there’s any shame in those jobs, but rather the shame exists in having to do work beyond teaching just to make ends meet.

Despite what certain networks and writers would like you to believe, teaching isn’t a profession people choose for the money or for the long vacations.  People choose to teach because they enjoy being a part of the learning process for children.  There’s an understanding going in that while on paper there are a number of long breaks, summer vacation, “work” days, and hours from 8-3 every day, that’s not the reality.  And people choose to teach anyway because knowing that a child will go on to do something amazing with their life and take with them a tiny part of you is pretty wonderful.

There’s no other profession that requires you to write detailed plans for the person replacing you when you get sick or need to be at a training.

No other profession requires you use your monthly pay to purchase your own books, materials, supplies, furniture, and pay for your own professional development and license to keep current so you can keep your job.

I can’t think of any other profession that requires you to use your time off to take courses so that you can improve your practice.

Very few other professions require that you continue to work before and after your contracted hours every day without compensation beyond pictures drawn on note cards and sweet notes from children stuffed in among the work you brought home.

And I don’t know of any other profession that is as publicly derided as teaching.  No other profession is under constant threat of having their jobs taken by people with no specialized education…because people think any idiot can teach.

I worked in a number of industries prior to coming to teaching and I never had to buy my own pens, legal pads, and printer paper.  I never had to pay for tests or training I was required to take to keep my job.  I never had to design plans for someone to do my job when I had to be out for a training or when I felt lousy.  Now and then I had to work late, but more often than not it was by choice or for a special event, and there was extra pay for that time.  I was often complained at when I told people where I worked–people don’t like management companies, how much glasses cost, how much office machines cost or how moronic techs seem, and they hate insurance companies on principle.  But it was never at ME personally…  When I say I’m a teacher, I’m attacked as a human being for the profession I chose and told I’m an idiot who is ruining our nation’s children and our nation by association.  That hurts.

When I left the insurance industry, I was making what I make now…after 12 years of teaching.  I took a $30K a year pay cut to become a teacher.  And I’m just now, after 12 years, making close to what I did as an insurance producer.

Teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and now local to me are walking out and being publicly shamed for “abandoning” their students.  They’re being shamed for asking for a living wage and supplies to be able to do their job while legislators are in session. They’re being told they’re easily replaced, that anyone out there could do their job better.  They’re being humiliated on national television by people who don’t understand child development, education, or even what kids need to know and be able to do.  They’re being told by old white men who are working as hard as they can to destroy all that we’ve done to improve the world that they need to go back to teaching like we are preparing factory workers for a lifetime of work in the mill because to them, that’s what education is for.

So what do we value?  Do we value people who are willing to give of their early mornings and evenings to do the things that need doing?  Do we value those who find innovative ways to reach children and challenge those who crave opportunities to learn about topics in ways that go beyond the surface? Do we value those who give their whole heart and soul to kids during what parents have said is the BEST part of their child’s day?

If we value those things, why is it so difficult to pay those who choose to do this work a reasonable salary?  Why is it so hard to provide them the materials and supplies and training they need to continue to do their job and improve in their practice?  Why is it that we can come up with $35 BILLION dollars to provide armed guards and guns for teachers after another school shooting, but can’t seem to find any money to provide school psychologists and counselors to support kids for every building full-time?  Why is it so impossible to keep our mouths shut when we know nothing of what the work of a teacher actually entails?

The average teacher in my county (with several years experience and a master’s degree) makes about $44,000 a year.  The opinion writer in our local paper indicated that the only thing teachers clearly require is additional financial education to ensure they live within their means…asking for more pay is just being greedy.

When you think about 1 bedroom apartment (if you can find one) costing $1500 a month in this area, the average student loan payment (because almost all of us have them) being more than that, and take-home pay for a teacher making $44,000 a year after taxes, health insurance, and other benefits are taken out is somewhere near $2700 a month, how again is it possible that a single teacher can live on so little?  There isn’t any financial education that can help get blood out of a stone.

So I ask again.  What do we value? Do we value education enough to pay a salary that a teacher can live on so that extra jobs aren’t required to survive?  Do we value education enough to pay for supplies and materials and training to ensure that the children who are entrusted to our educators have what they need to learn and grow to be able to be the innovators that tomorrow will require them to be?  Do we value our educators enough to expect that they receive the same benefits we are ok with everyone else having–time to be with our families, salary to live a life that is beyond “survival,” and a profession that’s respected by the public because it’s important…

It’s important.

I wonder sometimes whether so much of the internal turmoil I’ve felt in the past few years is directly related to the current political climate.  I’m a people pleaser by nature and a fixer, and often those two things cause problems.  I find that there is an internal struggle to ensure that those around me are happy, both with me and the world around them, and to ensure that people are educated so that they can make intelligent decisions that may impact someone else.

A friend posted a conversation going on in another group today concerning all the advertisers who are pulling their ads from a talk show on a debatably legitimate news network.  One of the more recent companies is one that several of us use regularly, and I’m proud of them for pulling their dollars from a talk show that refuses to acknowledge that young people might very well know something about what’s going on in the world.  The discussion in the group ranged from “Please no politics here!” to “Good for them!” to “Children know nothing and should sit down and shut up, allow the grown-ups to determine how our world should be–we know better than they do what’s right and what’s wrong!”

This is something as a teacher, particularly one of gifted children, I struggle with often.  When I was in the classroom the first year my school was open, I remember being shocked that children were willing to argue with their teachers about actual content and often their thinking was quite solid, rooted firmly in a happy mixture of fact and emotion.  Some colleagues were offended by it, but I was fascinated and wanted to understand their thought process… I’d worked previously in a low-income area and the children in my classes argued with me, but it was more along the lines of “You don’t know shit, Miss–you white!” because in their eyes, I couldn’t understand the things they were encountering at age 10.

Gifted children have this strange, but wonderful, innate sense of justice.  I’ve yet to encounter one that just goes with the flow and never questions anything.  Some wrestle with that sense of justice internally, asking broad questions of the adults in their worlds. Others wrestle with it publicly, calling others out for breaking the social contract and going into detail about why whatever they’re doing is just plain wrong.  And still others take action, creating clubs and organizations to combat the injustice they see in their school communities.  We’ve recently started to acknowledge those gifted leaders through formal identification, and that pleases me to no end, because it’s not something that can be captured with a test–it’s organic and a legitimate piece of who these kids are.

To stay that children cannot possibly understand what is going on in our society is wrong on so many levels.  Children today are living in a much different world than we did growing up.  They have access to almost unlimited information and most of their parents have raised them to ask questions about what they see and hear.  Those parental responses are what shape the way they handle things, how they process them, and in many cases, what they choose to do about it.

Most people, today anyway, are fairly vocal about what they think, particularly on the internet where there’s a delay in the judgment from others.  They have opinions that they’ve formed over time, with information provided by their parents and other people they’ve encountered, a variety of news networks, magazines, and other media (that they choose, so that filter matters), and life experiences that shape how they feel about particular things.  Some are lucky enough to have a broad range of experiences that help them understand situations they may not have experienced themselves, while others have only ever existed in their tiny microcosm of society, and so only know what they’ve experienced.  It’s a fascinating social experiment, isn’t it?

The kids who are speaking out about changes to how we purchase, keep, and regulate guns understand fully the injustice they’re fighting, many with firsthand knowledge of being shot at.  Most adults have never had a gun in their school or classroom or workplace, never had one pointing at them, and never had to recover from watching others around them get shot.  I’d say that these kids have a far better understanding of what’s needed to ensure those things stop happening than the majority of Americans.

The difference is that the people speaking out against the kids and their requests of our government have often never experienced a shooting of any kind at all or experienced shooting only through the lens of trying to take out a five-point buck or a stack of beer cans on a stump at 500 yards with a military grade weapon for fun, yet they are so married to the idea of owning a whole arsenal of guns because a two line amendment to a 200-year-old document says they have the right to “bear arms” that they can’t see the devil standing right in front of them…

Growing up, my parents were very anti-rabble-rouser and demanded I keep any opinions I may have on controversial topics to myself.  My father ranted often about MLK and civil rights leaders who marched to ensure that people were treated fairly.  He had no real reason to hate people of color, and didn’t believe that they were “less than” necessarily, but couldn’t wrap his head around people demanding that things change in this way.  We fought a lot about people who wanted to make a difference and chose to both say and do something, rallying those around them to join them in the call for change.  He couldn’t understand that there are lots of ways to work for change that’s needed.

I’m not the type to organize a march or a rally–I stand on the fringes, at the back of the pack, content in knowing that my presence matters even if I don’t say much.  I’m not the sort to stand on stage and demand to be heard, choosing instead to use words on the page to share what I think.  I am, however, exactly the sort who will support kids as they advocate for changes that have a very good chance of benefitting the greater good.  I’m exactly the sort who will ask kids to talk out their thinking, not so I can destroy their ideas if I disagree, but so that they have the opportunity to see the consequences they might otherwise not be able to if they went from idea to action.  I’m exactly the type who will teach kids from an early age to question things when something feels “off” about a situation, and not to give up when an adult tells them to sit down and shut up.

A little less than four years ago, I wrote the first post to what I hoped would be the blog I finally shared with people.  I’d started and abandoned several.  As I reread it today, I still feel just as strongly about my work with gifted students as I did then.

And here we are, eons later, with the second post, at a time in my life when I’m trying to move beyond classifying myself as the label associated with my profession and figure out who I really am.  Spring Break affords the time to think, to write, to publish.

I tend to put my thoughts about a lot of issues, education-related or not, on Facebook or in my paper journal because depending on what I have to say, I either want to spark a conversation or make a point or I want to just get it out of my system so I don’t carry it around with me–sometimes my thoughts are heavy.  But several times in the past week someone asked if I had a blog…and thought I really should.

I follow a number of blogs relating to personal development, spirituality, mindfulness, and a theme over the past few days has been the story we tell to the world.  I began to wonder, what’s my story? What’s the story I share with the people in my life, and those who randomly show up?

Is my story the one about the only child now trying to be a caregiver while holding down a job I love and trying to have a life of my own at the same time full of guilt for not giving enough, being there enough, doing the right things enough?

Is my story the one about the grown woman carrying around word-seared scars from long ago that still ramble around unattended in her head, reminding her she’s less than, not enough, fat, and far too stupid to accomplish much who just wants to be what makes people happy.

Is my story the one about the almost mid-40-year-old woman who has to check the box for “single” when filling out forms, but really is for all intents and purposes married to someone she never wants to be apart from?

Is my story the one about the teacher turned pseudo-admin who has to walk a fine line between friendship and work while navigating the rocky coast of finding friends at 40?

Is my story the one about the pseudo-admin who cringes at the words “assistant principal” because the connotation of those words imply that my role is to punish and discipline kids and not support them through a learning opportunity?

Is my story the one about the woman buried beneath a mountain of student loans, enduring judgment from well-meaning friends when she declines offers to go out, while trying to make it seem like she has her shit together but is selling off belongings to make it to payday and internally jealous of people who can leave work to take three week-long vacations to Europe without a care in the world, planned on the spur of the moment…or hell, just the person who can call a repairman to fix the oven that died the night before?

Is my story the one of the gifted education session presenter who worries that she was chosen because there was an extra opening and nothing she has to say is really all that important or will be taken seriously, who glides on ribbons of happiness for days when people actually show up to listen to what she’s sharing, nodding in agreement with faces upturned and bright with the words “preach sister!” on their lips, who waits on pins and needles for feedback about how everyone else thought the presentation went that never comes?

Is my story the one about the woman trying to figure it all out, trying to make time to meditate, practice yoga, and walk a little more, seeking support through reiki and acupuncture because they don’t judge her for being a bit fluffy and don’t prescribe drugs that never get to the heart of what’s going on, masking the symptoms and letting me think that everything’s fine when it’s still so very much not?

Is my story the one about the introvert who is kind of afraid to leave the house sometimes because it’s so much simpler and safer to binge watch West Wing because at least there, people are invested in their work for all the right reasons and crises are solved in 43 minutes and I know how it all ends?

More than one friend has brought up the idea of the “masks” we wear in our everyday lives and how we change them based on who we are with and what situations we’re in.  Mine?  I have a whole trunk-full, and they’re awful heavy to carry around:

The daughter, the girlfriend/wife, the teacher, the coach, the pseudo-admin, the friend, the yogini, the skeptical-yet-hopeful meditator, the 10-year-old-girl with 30-year-old scars with voices, the presenter, the couch-potato-Netflix-binger…

The stories and masks we choose to share with the world matter because they define who we want to show in a given moment and how we are perceived…and they determine the direction that our lives take, whether we’re always the victim or sometimes the hero or usually the good guy.

So what’s your story?

I have taught school for eight years. Over time, I’ve realized one thing that was consistent within education at a general level amid new curriculums, scripted programs, RTI and classroom interventions, the latest and greatest methodologies being presented.

I came across a blog that made reference to a what happens to gifted students by comparing them to tall poppies in a field or garden.  Because they stand out, they are crushed, cut down, and otherwise destroyed, to ensure that the garden looks uniform.   What teachers are being required to use to teach is essentially a lawnmower.  It assumes that all students fit neatly into the garden, with nothing being taller or more advanced than anything else.  There’s support built in for those things that grow a bit slower, but little to nothing for those that shoot past the others.

Our gifted kids are those tall poppies.  The garden is our classroom, our schools, our educational system. We crush our tall poppies to make things more uniform.  To ensure that all students are demonstrating their knowledge in a way that is easy to assess and that fits in a nice, neat little box.  In one school in which I taught, I was told that all students must be doing the same work at the same time.  I wasn’t allowed to differentiate for anyone.  In another, fellow educators wanted all students doing the same projects, the same writing prompts, and the same worksheets in the same way.  It’s easier to grade, they said.  It was the only way to ensure that all the students had learned the same thing and met the standard in the same way.

I was still a newer teacher then, and very unsure of myself after being cut down myself while working in a traditional school. Our school was still new and developing systems for how we did things.  I didn’t question it because those telling me that was how things ought to be done had far more experience than I.  I felt such unease as I watched my gifted students struggle to complete projects when they could show they knew so much more if they  were given the opportunity to do their assignment differently.  So I rebelled quietly.  I began to take the ideas we came up with as a team and open them up, giving more general guidelines for students to follow, and when they asked “Can I…” I said yes, knowing  their idea would give them the opportunity to experience skills like decision making, problem solving, and creative thinking.

With every assignment and project, my students were getting more involved in the content, asking questions even I didn’t know the answers to.  It was rocky for all of us.  I found out that I wasn’t as much of a resource as I wanted to be, that I had room to grow. I needed to know more about  our content, about how they thought, how I could question with purpose, and where we could find information on the fly and how to handle it when we couldn’t find what we wanted. They found that they had freedoms in our classroom they’d never felt before.   Some skated by and I’ll admit I didn’t catch them all.  Some were still afraid to try, for fear that by doing anything, it would be seen as wrong and once again, they’d be crushed or cut down.

My team was not pleased.  I didn’t do what we’d agreed to do, and they said that parents were upset because it wasn’t easy to see how their child’s work stood up to the rest.  It was jumbled, messy, and unclear.  I questioned our practice–did we really grade work comparing one student’s work to that of another?  I never had.  One of my teammates was upset because the kids had done the work themselves, without fixing from me, and it didn’t look as good as she felt it should to be on display.  When I explained that this is what work that kids do looks like at this level, she questioned my ability to teach at all and asked why I hadn’t fixed it–it should be perfect if the public was going to see it.  She taught her students that if their work didn’t look a certain way, it wasn’t worth sharing.

Was that the message that we wanted our kids to get from us?

Then there was what I heard outside of my classroom, outside of my school, from other educators.  “Those damn gifted kids” cause problems in the classroom.  They’re disruptive, rude, and act like know-it-alls.  They refuse to work.  They refuse to put their books away while I’m teaching.  They talk back and question my authority on content, and then dare to bring up alternative theories.

I told my fellow teachers, of course they are disruptive!  They’re bored!  They need challenge and to have opportunities to go beyond what is next in the textbook.  They need to learn to question and to use their knowledge to form ideas and new questions!  What saddened me most was when these educators, many of whom I had admired until then, said that it was up the kids to conform, to be quiet, to not question anything, because they were under no obligation to change how they taught to allow students to do anything that stepped outside of what was next in the curriculum. Many said they would not change how they taught to accommodate the needs of one child–it hurts the others when someone isn’t the same. They could get all the enrichment they wanted on their own time.

I was so upset…I read everything I could on teaching gifted kids in the regular classroom.  And I found that most teachers had no idea how to do it.  It wasn’t about handing them independent study and leaving them to learn on their own. It wasn’t about making them “teacher’s helper,” either, when their work was finished.

So it wasn’t because these teachers hated their gifted students…they didn’t understand how to help them and it was simpler to refuse to do it than to look into how they might.  I thought back to my own teacher training in gifted education.  10 minutes during a week-long course in meeting the needs of special education students.  The instructor essentially said, “There are kids who are gifted.  They learn faster than other kids.  You should do stuff to challenge them.”

And then I found out how little support gifted kids get in a traditional school environment.  Many get a pull out class 2-3 times a week, usually less and never at all if there is testing going on, to do enrichment projects with a resource teacher.  Some get accelerated into a level they need, like the kindergartener I had when I student taught who came to first grade math and our highest reading group.  This only happens if the schedule can accommodate it….once the schedules between levels don’t match up, it stops for most kids. Others go to magnet programs where, in theory, they are being challenged in their classes by teachers who have experience in working with gifted kids.  But most, because of budgetary constraints, get nothing at all. They may not even get identified because no one is on staff to do the work.  Some of the first positions cut when things need to be cut are gifted resource teachers, and many districts have no one in charge of gifted programming at all.

And here was the most disheartening thing of all, which explains why there are so few resources for gifted students.  Identified gifted students in my state earn a school or a district $9.00 each per school year.  In many states, this is far less, if there is anything at all.  Special education students, for whom the government has said publicly need more help to get to grade level so that we can count them among the typical student population, earn two or three hundred dollars each per year for a school.  I am not saying they are not deserving of that funding–they are, and it should be even greater if I can be honest, because special education departments are already running far too thin to meet the needs of all the students they serve.   What I am saying is that there is a huge discrepancy between one type of special need and the other that must be addressed.  Some say that gifted kids “will be just fine” because already they are smarter than everyone else…

Fact is, our tall poppies won’t “be just fine” if they have to continue to do without what they need to grow and develop as learners and citizens.  They need more from us.  We can’t change the funding problem overnight, but we can do things in our own classrooms to ensure that our tall poppies can grow at the rate they do so naturally and support them when they’re ready to grow faster.

This means that educators have to be willing to change how we do things. Some of us will need to rebel quietly to keep our positions.  We need to change how we view these kids who sit so far outside of the “box” that they confound and frustrate us.  We have to be willing to do some hard work and learn more about how they think, about what they need, both academically and socially.  We also have to do some hard work within ourselves, and be willing to step outside of our comfort zone wherever we are on our path as educators and be willing to listen to our tall poppies about what they need from us.

I hope you’ll join me in the garden.