Taylor Mali answers back.
“I decide to bite my tongue instead of his…we’re eating, after all, and this is supposed to be polite conversation…’I mean you’re a teacher Taylor, c’mon. What do you make?’ And I wished he hadn’t done that. Asked me to be honest.”
Taylor Mali is a former teacher and now full-time globe-trotting poet / advocate and recruiter for the teaching profession. He’s written a book: What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World that sprung out of a performance poem of the same name.
In an era when education reform is sorely needed and when boys are looking for role models who will lead and inspire, it great to see a man like Mali be unapologetic in stating the importance of his profession.
Below is an early, solo, slam-poetry performance by Mali of the same material, raw and unpolished.
I was a college English teacher. I was loved by my students. My students loved coming to my classes. It is not the same as teaching in elementary schools which somehow seem like glorified babysitting shops. I know my subject and know it well. I am a Master of my subject. I loved my job but ran up against a world dominated by men…politics…backstabbing…at least this was a problem where I taught. I have given it up but I really miss it. Also, the field had become over-crowded. I was told by well known writer I did not need a… Read more »
In a six year period only 1 in 2500 Illinois teachers lost their jobs due to performance or misconduct, compared to 1 in 57 doctors and 1 in 97 lawyers. Looks like the union is more interested in protecting their union due base than anything remotely related to the children they are charged with educating. I hardly think fear of dismissal is a motivating factor here.
http://hiddenviolations.com/stories/?prcss=display&id=358596
As long as teachers have labor unions like service and manufacturing workers, they will be thought of in the the same way, NOT as professionals. The AFT and NEA remind me of the scene in “Animal House” when the Deltas are picking which students are going to be admitted to the fraternity. The decide to take all of them, derelicts and losers included, because “We need the dues.” Evaluating teachers based on standardized test scores is impossible, because every teacher works with different kinds of kids, whose ability to learn covers a wide spectrum. But there is a way to… Read more »
I’m from Chicago and have been through the public school system here. In fact, the last teachers’ strike was when I was in Kindergarten. I have these few things to say about the teachers’ strike.. 1. The so-called teachers are turning out children who are barely literate. The teachers themselves can’t even write a proper sentence or use proper grammar. 2. The schools themselves need more money for books and supplies not the teachers. 3. The teachers claim to spend all summer long lesson planning and then also claim they spend hours before and after school lesson planning. Does it… Read more »
Jennifer, I am not from Chicago, so some of your points I can not address. But as a teacher for 11 years, I can assure you of this: teachers do spend a lot of time planning and preparing lessons during the summer and after school (besides grading). In my years of teaching, I have never taught the same lesson the same way. Each class demands a different approach. Plus, good teachers are always looking for better ways to teach skills and reach new generations of students. Think of a professional fighter. The training for each bout may be similar, but… Read more »
The core of the Chicago issue is for that city to figure out. From what I’ve read Rahm and the Union chief got off to a bad start, he made some changes to their work day and they were PO’d from the get go. I read that they wanted a 36% increase over 4 years, but may ultimately settle on around 18% increase over the same time period. Again, I’m all for people making money, especially teachers, but supposedly the school system is losing money hand over fist. I know there were some issues with the standard tests and I… Read more »
It’s not the fear of evaluation. It’s the type of evaluation. Standardized testing does not provide accurate data to evaluate a teacher. Students are not products, so you can not evaluate educators like you evaluate a person producing widgets. The factors that come in to play are so varied that it becomes necessary to evaluate teachers by many observable points of data. Student performance is one point of data, not the whole picture.
Trey- What you are saying is the core of the argument in Chicago and for what happened to students and teachers in Atlanta. Students performance, and teachers performance(and pay) and the amount of resources allocated to a particular school system are based on a standardized system that is not accurate and does not work well. While I don’t condone behavior like in Atlanta, I’m relatively certain that if the Atlanta School Board , the salaries, and the schools themselves had the resources they need instead of teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets, and if they didn’t have… Read more »
Teachers are great, the overwhelming majority of them. Having said that, if they’re bad and aren’t held accountable, they need to be fired ASAP. In Atlanta last year more than 100 teachers were found guilty of changing grades. The students didn’t know, they thought they had all earned that higher grade. In reality it was an orchestrated move to keep a district’s test score above where it otherwise would’ve been. That’s the frustrating thing about the Chicago strike. On average their pay is 70K +, far above average salary in Chicago. I’m all for people making money, but when only… Read more »
I love Mr. Mali’s work. Possibly my favorite, other than the above, is this one: http://taylormali.com/poems-online/like-lilly-like-wilson/