Categories
Antiwork

Contributed to national teacher shortage

My wife is a teacher in a private school. A college degree and relevant experience are required to work at such a school as a teacher, that part makes sense and is reasonable. The school has plenty of students and a couple of buildings, in another word, financially strong. But the pay is just a few dimes more than the market price of babysitters in our area, which required no degree nor experience. As we are fully aware the above situation is not fair, she decided to play along because at least she has something to do and some income, better than nothing. Then one day their school admins pulled her aside, gave her a write-up of a long list of improvements and policy clarifications, etc. Basically complaining she's not doing her job well. As long as she showed me the list, I told her to resign from her position.…


My wife is a teacher in a private school.

A college degree and relevant experience are required to work at such a school as a teacher, that part makes sense and is reasonable.

The school has plenty of students and a couple of buildings, in another word, financially strong.

But the pay is just a few dimes more than the market price of babysitters in our area, which required no degree nor experience.

As we are fully aware the above situation is not fair, she decided to play along because at least she has something to do and some income, better than nothing.

Then one day their school admins pulled her aside, gave her a write-up of a long list of improvements and policy clarifications, etc. Basically complaining she's not doing her job well.

As long as she showed me the list, I told her to resign from her position. My reasons are being :

  1. If the school is not happy with her performance and starts documenting things, it's a matter of time she got fired.
  2. It'll consume her too much energy to do all those things and the pay is not worth it.
  3. We need to contribute to the national teacher shortage, collectively to send these capitalists a message that: they're losing negotiation power to abuse teachers the way they want, more importantly at the rate, they are paying.

I'm not painting my wife's image as a complete victim or a holy person per se. Yes, she has not done her job well enough and to some degree, deserved to be reminded for improvement.

But my focus is more on the other side, if they really want a high-grade teacher-level of work, they can't pay a babysitter's wage and expect people to do all babysitting + quality teaching + assembly-line discipline + military style of order-obeying.

Also, I'm not downplaying babysitters. We hire a babysitter, all we ask for is babysitting and nothing else, we don't demand the babysitter to provide quality teaching, not demand to have assembly-line discipline, not required to obey rules like in the military.

I think we are all pretty clear what's the direct cause of the national teacher shortage.

So a resignation letter was sent and we'll see how things go.

Please thumbs up and reply if you would like to hear an update.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.