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Letters

Putting Teachers in the Firing Line

To the Editor:

Re “Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?” (front page, March 3):

I wish that everyone who thinks that teachers are “glorified baby sitters” who go home at 3 o’clock could spend a week doing the job.

For decades I have nagged my husband to quit teaching because I can’t stand his 70-hour workweeks. As a New York City high school teacher, he has on average 170 students each day. That translates into 170 tests and essays to mark on a regular basis, on top of having to create two or three lesson plans for each day.

It’s a rare person who can do this job well. It’s exhausting, and when you add the lack of appreciation of teachers, there’s little motivation for a new generation to take on this vital task.

In fact, I’ve been telling our kids since they were born not to become teachers. Now, watching their dad, they’ve come to the same conclusion.

Regina Weiss
Brooklyn, March 3, 2011

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To the Editor:

Teachers have been mocked since I started teaching in the mid-1970s. (“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”) This type of attitude from armchair critics, along with critical feelings about our “cushy” daytime hours and summers off, has run rampant for years. It is time to set the record straight.

Our children need teachers, and there is a cadre of people who are willing to teach them at ridiculously low pay relative to other professions. Why? For most, simply, it is a calling.

What justifies the hours that we keep? Teaching is an incredibly hard job. As much as we love it, it is exhausting. Many of us go home and immediately take a quick nap. Then, of course, there is lesson plan preparation, papers to grade, parents to call, and on and on, on our own time.

Pay respected teachers a fair wage and have a fair system of evaluation, and there will be few complaints. Have a systematic method of weeding out ones who are not doing the job. Acknowledge that teachers have only limited influence regarding the environment outside school that often accounts for low test scores. Do not attempt to remove our right to collective bargaining. And, most of all, value us by supporting us.

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Credit...Emily Flake

Terry Weitzen
Highland Park, N.J., March 3, 2011

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To the Editor:

It is a mystery why teachers fail to understand the public perception. They do not work a full day, they have significant time off during the day, they have extensive vacation time, they can be granted tenure and they have a retirement benefits package that is the envy of all except top corporate executives. Any additional activity, like being a coach, club leader or adviser, is generally compensated.

Now don’t get me wrong. The uniformed unions also have overreaching benefits that need renegotiation. But it is the teachers with whom the public has the greatest contact and who regularly whine about how poorly treated they are and demand raises from struggling taxpayers on whose shoulders their compensation falls.

It is high time they wake up and begin to understand that they do not exist in a vacuum and that their ivory towers need a dose of reality.

Richard M. Frauenglass
Huntington, N.Y., March 3, 2011

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To the Editor:

When politicians and corporate executives who advocate cutting funds for public schools work in buildings where clocks don’t work and chairs and desks are falling apart, where their books are so decrepit they include outdated information, where computers are old, where wiring is exposed and too out-of-date to support more computers, where the roof is leaking, walls are crumbling and it’s so cold in winter they have to wear heavy coats inside their workplace, when these politicians and executives who want to dismantle public education have to buy their own toilet paper, then I may have a little respect for them.

Allen Berger
Savannah, Ga., March 3, 2011

The writer is founder of Teens for Literacy, a program to improve literacy in inner-city schools.

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To the Editor:

Once again some on the right have pointed at a group and said that “these people are the ones causing your problems,” and the Tea Partiers have swallowed it whole. This vitriol against teachers strikes me as yet another anti-intellectual strike in the so-called culture war being waged in this country.

Very few of these people have any idea what teachers actually make, or the effort they put into teaching children. If they spent any time thinking about it and researching it, they’d realize that most teachers are woefully underpaid for what they do.

All of these people who are maligning teachers should ask themselves where they would be without those who taught them. Chances are a great deal worse off.

Chris Williams
Lapeer, Mich., March 3, 2011

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To the Editor:

Why the heapings of scorn on teachers and the unions?

One word: performance.

Until student performance improves, all deals are off.

Joan Adams
Brooklyn, March 3, 2011

The writer is a business teacher at Baruch College.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Putting Teachers in the Firing Line. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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