#17: In which I realize something important.

My dad thinks it's a good idea. The St. Helens school board would like to put it into our contract. Teachers in Denver, most famously, and many other places as well, think it is the bee's knees (Though you know what I think the bee's knees is? Other than the phrase "the bee's knees," of course? It's the name I found of a teacher in Eagle County, Colorado, when I looked for an article about merit pay in that state: Kate Turnipseed. Seriously.). The President of the United States, along with most other politicians (Following the trickle-down theory of political platforms, that those scrambling to get on the coattails use wedge issue stances as a handhold, like that bar you used to have to grab when jumping onto a passing streetcar. Or maybe it's just because shit flows downhill.), are all in favor of it, and use this particular concept as a means of reaching compromise between liberals and conservatives. School vouchers may be controversial, but everyone, it seems, is in favor of this.

It's merit pay. And not everyone is in favor of it.

It's a compelling case for many people, because it makes so much sense. It works like this: in order to encourage the best teachers to stay in the profession, and to keep doing what they are doing that is successful, you increase their pay. You give them merit bonuses when they do well, and you don't when they don't. (You clear room in payroll for those merit bonuses by cutting the base salary back. That way, the teachers who perform poorly suffer a financial loss. Gotta have a stick to follow the carrot.)

See? Doesn't that make sense? Aren't you in favor of it, now? After all: what motivation would a teacher have to work hard and do a good job, when he is going to be making the same amount of money no matter how well or poorly his students do? There's no accountability for the failing students there. That's no way to run a country. You reward good work, and you penalize bad work. That makes good, solid, capitalistic sense: the good ol' profit motive. It drives everything else, so why not schools?

All right: you know where I'm going with this. Let me just get there.

On a basic, philosophical level, I am against merit pay for exactly the reason other people are for it: it rewards good work with more money. There are some things -- many things, actually -- in life that are not driven, and should not be driven, by the profit motive. These blogs, for instance. Sure, I'd love it if I made money off of them, or if they increased my fame sufficiently that it helped me sell my books (Did you notice that I wrote a book? And that it's for sale? The link's on the side, there.), but that hasn't happened in the four years I've been blogging. Yet somehow, I continue to blog, with some regularity. My books, too: while I'm happy that I'm making money off of the sales of my electronic books, there aren't a lot of sales, and it isn't a lot of money. I am far more happy that people are reading my book, and so far, they like it.

I teach for my paycheck, sure. But that's not why I try to teach better, to work harder. I do that because I am face to face with over 150 students a day, and they need my help. (They need someone's help, at least. Probably a fashion designer, first. Man, they dress badly. You have no idea. Unless you've seen a teenage girl that's sixty pounds overweight wearing skin-tight jeans and stiletto heels.) I understand that some of the things I do are of benefit to them. I know that some of the time that they are in class is wasted, and whenever that happens, it's a missed opportunity that won't come back. They lost a chance to learn something which now they may never learn. It probably doesn't matter very much, it was probably a small thing like rhythm and rhyme in poetry, which I spend about six minutes on each year -- but maybe it does matter. Maybe that's the thing that would strike a spark in a kid's head, make them more interested in poetry. Maybe a kid would get it after that, after learning that there is a purpose to the twisted sentence structure of classical poetry, that it's not just written that way because the poet was drunk or insane -- or on crack, which is their usual guess when I ask why the author did this or that.

No, that's not right. You know what my students guess when they don't know an author's intention and don't want to think it through? They say that the author did it because they wanted to sell the story or poem or novel, and make money. It's their fallback answer, the one they feel they can always rely on. Because we have taught them to rely on it.

I work hard because I want to inspire a student to love literature. To want to read. To want to understand. In my particular stretch of the K-12 road, I also want kids to learn to argue, and to argue well, because I believe that is a particularly useful skill, and it's one that I have and can teach. I don't teach argument because it's on the state tests, or even in the state standards. (It is in the state standards, by the way, lest you worry that I am wasting students' time on unnecessary things like critical thinking when I should be teaching SMART skills [That would be Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Research-based, and Time-bound. It's the list of criteria for goals we want to set for student achievement. I learned that at my PLC conference two weeks ago. Don't you wish you had my job? What if you earned a merit bonus -- would you want it then?]. I just don't think about the state standards while I am teaching it.) You know what I do based solely on the profit motive? I period sub when there's an unexpected absence -- that's the big one. I used to run Saturday detention, though part of the motive there was because it gave me four hours of uninterrupted work time. And it made me feel like Dick in "The Breakfast Club," who has become a much more sympathetic character for me since I've been a teacher. I show up to meetings. I make sure I stay my full eight hours at work a day. I fill out paperwork.

And that's it: everything else I do for school, I do because I want the students to learn, and because I want the students to love English like I do. You can give me more money, sure; I'll take it. You can give me less money, though if it's much less, I'll quit and find a new job that pays more. But the money you offer me is not going to make me work harder, and it isn't going to make me a better teacher. In fact, any attempt to offer me more money based on how well I do my job is just going to piss me off: because it assumes that I do my job well because it earns me money, that I work hard for the sake of the money. It assumes that I would work harder if I were offered more money. It's a bribe, and it reduces me from a teacher, from someone who loves and honors my subject, my craft, to a money-grubber. A dog after a bigger bone. A whore, if we want to go all the way down into the mud with this; and while that's hyperbole, it's also apt. Because in fact, I do love this. I love what I do, and I believe in it, in its importance and its value to the individual students and to our society. This is why I do it well.

It is also why it frustrates me so much, and why I want to get out of it: I'm in one of those relationships where I am constantly unappreciated, neglected, and even abused, verbally, mentally, and emotionally. I still stick with it because I can see the good in him (You have no idea how it feels to realize this. I've never actually put it into these terms before, but my God, is it apt. Wow. An epiphany while writing. My first thought? How could I teach this to my students?).

Okay, stop the presses. This is amazing. I have actually put an entirely new name onto what I do, and how it affects me, and it is exactly right: I am a mentally battered wife, a victim of abuse. Here I am in this situation that isn't any good for me. I know it. I see what it does to me, that it makes me doubt myself and hate myself, that it consumes everything else and that there is still no tangible reward for it (And speaking of tangible rewards, I will get back to merit pay, and I will address the idea that just popped into someone's head: "Wouldn't it be nice if you got a tangible reward for your hard work? Like some more money?"). My wife, who is also my best friend, is both jealous of the time I spend with it and concerned about how it affects me, and she can't understand why I stick with it, why I put so much of myself into a relationship that does me harm. My parents, though we haven't talked about it directly, seem to feel that I should stand by it, stick with it and just try harder to make things right, because that's what people do. Though I should say that my dad did change jobs when he felt like his current one was going nowhere, so I bet if I did tell him straight out how I felt about teaching and that I was leaving it for another profession, he'd support me entirely. I survive in it because I have the support of a wonderful group of people who are in exactly the same position, and so constantly strive to push each other, and me, to stick it out, to look at the bright side. (An aside: in a meeting a week or so ago, one of our teachers, who is leaving the profession at the end of this year to pursue a Master's in library science, and who couldn't be happier to get out of this shit, listened to the rest of us bitching about our jobs and our students, and then she asked, with genuine befuddlement in her voice, "So why do you do this, then? Teaching?" And there was a brief pause before several of them started talking about their students, their connections to kids, their positive experiences discussing and working with young minds and with literature. But I had nothing to say.) And I stay, as I was saying, because I know there's good in it, because it hasn't all been bad; there are happy memories, especially from the beginning when things were better, when the school treated me better, when I was more appreciated and more valued, when the circumstances weren't so terrible. When I still had my figure. Heh. I stay because somehow, I believe that if I just work hard enough, if I find just the right thing to do, then everything will be better. The school will change. Then I'll be vindicated, and happy. And there is an element of martyrdom as well: I feel justified because I am sacrificing so much for the noble tradition of this institution, because I am standing by it through thick and thin. Defending it, even, in these contract negotiations. And I feel like the more I suffer, the more it makes me a good person, one who cares, one who tries harder than anyone else, except for the other people in my situation, the other abused wives.

Wow. My head is spinning. I'm Carmela fucking Soprano.

I need to get out of teaching. Like, now.

But here's the thing about merit pay -- since I hate to leave the original thread dangling, just because I had a moment of clarity -- you want to make my sad, abused situation better by offering me money? By stripping away the small parts of my job that I do still love, the things that still make me happy, and leaving me with nothing but the mechanical, soulless aspects of it -- the teaching of discrete, measurable skills that have no purpose other than to raise test scores and earn me more money? Do you not see? You would pimp me out, put me on the streets to make money, to earn what you want, what you think you need, by forcing me to do what I now do for love, for money. And you would make me do this with threats that if I don't, you'll take away my money, or even throw me out entirely.

That's why I don't like merit pay. And I didn't even get into how hard it is to determine exactly what I should do as a teacher (Raise test scores? Raise grades? Keep students off drugs and in school? Inspire them? Entertain them? Make them better citizens? Make them good writers and good thinkers? Raise their self-confidence?) and how hard it is to determine if it is my efforts that help the students improve, and how hard it is to determine if the students truly improve. Maybe I can write about that another time. Right now I have to go think -- very, very hard -- about my job.