and what gets my goat is it is teachers exactly like that who did NOT lose their jobs but I did. Now don't misunderstand, for me personally, I love not having to commute and I love what I am doing online and I love being able to have time to devote to this degree. But really it is the administrations who are letting teachers who cannot teach remain IN the schools and getting rid of the rest of us. I don't think it is entirely the teachers at fault here, nothing else is demanded of them. Which one of us, who acted like that teacher, would still have a job out in the business world at the end of the day. Yet they all have jobs for decades within the safe havens of our schools. Something is very wrong with how we are educating our youth, the leaders of tomorrow, and we will pay the price of this miseducation - I don't think it will be pretty ....
The march in Washington is exactly the way to start real change. I constantly hear educators complaining about what is happening on their campus, in their district, when the real problem is what has trickled down from terrible judgment on a national and state level. When we stand at the bottom of a mountain looking up (our campuses), we can't see all of the obstacles we'll fight along the way. If we start at the top of the mountain looking down (Washington), we will at last begin to see the things that we need to chunk away at to find the most efficient path to change.
The best incentives that we can offer teachers are respect and support. That it not what they are getting now. What they are getting now is the exact same mistake that we, to our national disgrace, made when our troops came home from Vietnam. They are being falsely accused of being responsible for all the things beyond their control and all the things they were forced to do that led to the failure of a mission they did not write. Worse than our conduct as a nation at the end of Vietnam, there are many who seek to exploit this abuse of our educators and schools for profit, both financial and ideological. We must support, honor and respect our teachers just as we do our troops. Nothing less is acceptable.
"And we need to be able to do that over a career, not for a two year stop-over before law school, and not just for a few years until we have our own children and can't work 70-80 hours a week."
I can see the solution to the former as making teaching attractive enough to keep the best from leaving. But, what is the solution to the latter? Are you suggesting that teachers choose their career over having a family or that teaching shouldn't be a 70-80 hour/week profession? Or am I missing a third option?