Class Is in Session!

Welcome everyone! With the permission of my awesome editor, Chris Queen, I’m starting a column on education. Feel free to e-mail me ideas and suggestions for the column either through my e-mail address: amymdenton@gmail.com or, for VIP Platinum members, you can message me your ideas from the website. Keep in mind that I have plenty of material to use, so while I’m happy to receive suggestions, I don’t know how many I’ll be able to use, and I probably won’t be able to respond to each individual e-mail. Now, if I could just get paid by the word, as Charles Dickens did, I’d have to ask Chris. (That’s a joke!)

Also, I will be writing on what happens in Texas. All of my examples will come from my experiences in Texas. I cannot speak for the entirety of public education, nor do I want to. There are fifty states in the U.S. Each one does education differently.

There are plenty of misconceptions about what being a teacher today means. That is largely because everyone remembers being in school, whether public or private, and figures that school hasn’t changed that much. Yes, yes, it has. It’s shocking how much schools have changed. As I have stated in previous articles, schools stopped being about education a long time ago. Today, a majority of public schools are premium baby-sitting services. As long as everything looks good on the surface, it doesn’t matter about the reality. As long as the money keeps coming, it’s all good.

First misconception: Teachers don’t work very long during the day. They finish early in the afternoon and then go home. *insert hysterical laughter* How I wish this were true. When I taught high school, the day started at 7:30 a.m. I was expected to be in the building and ready to go by 7:00 a.m. I was usually up by 5:30 a.m. and out the door by 6:30 a.m. Nothing surprising there. The official school day ended at 2:30 p.m. I didn’t leave the building until 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. I had students doing make-up work, worked on setting up the lessons for the next day, or did anything in between.

Here’s the dirty little secret: I didn’t get paid a dime after 2:30 p.m. or before 7:30 am. My contract and my salary were for school hours only. Anything I did before 7:30 a.m. or after 2:30 p.m. was done for free. It is still that way today; I checked. So, any after-school clubs, meetings, or get-togethers for students were done without a dime of payment. If you left the building directly at 2:30 p.m. or just after, you were looked at. Guilt and shame are powerful motivators for teachers, and they work really well. It worked on me for years. I had to stiffen my spine and say, basically, ‘Watch me’ if I left anywhere near 2:30 p.m.

An aside: I once had the early morning local news on, and I think they were hoping that people were still half asleep and weren’t paying that much attention. Just after Michael Jackson did the interview where he said little children slept in the same bed as him, the black newscaster for the channel I had on looked straight into the camera and said, “I remember Michael Jackson when he was black.” Total dead air. I’ve never seen it before or since.

Second misconception: Teachers get a three-month paid vacation. *insert more hysterical laughter* No, they don’t. They are contracted for nine months, usually September — May. So, teachers become very good at taking nine months and stretching it to cover twelve. A lot of them teach in summer school so they don’t have to stretch the paychecks. Take nine months of your salary and cover all twelve months of the year. This type of contract is usually applied to teachers. Anyone in administration, from principals on up, has a twelve-month contract.

This next part is about a law that affected teachers as well as other public servants, like firemen and police officers. For over 40 years, a portion of public servants got hosed on Social Security. In 1983, under the guise of “reforming” Social Security, the Windfall Provisions Act was passed into law. Simply put, if a person worked one of the public service jobs that weren’t covered by Social Security, they would either receive a greatly reduced payout from Social Security when they hit the age of 65, or they wouldn’t receive anything at all. It also affected all of the family members connected to that Social Security account. Social Security was considered a “windfall” because the public sector had its own pensions and rules. (Social Security is a windfall. Riiiiiiight)

Honestly, if you don’t pay into the system, then you shouldn’t get anything back, but the little wrinkle is that those in the public sector weren’t told about the reduction of Social Security benefits; at least, they weren’t when I was in teaching. I was in my fourth year of teaching before I learned about it. Warn people, maybe? In the end, only 7% of the public sector workforce was affected, and teachers happened to be a part of that percentage. The bill was sponsored by a Democrat from Illinois, who later went to jail on corruption charges. It was ended by Congress in 2025 through the Social Security Fairness Act.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back next week with more on education.