It’s a month of anniversaries for me. Thirty years ago this March, I was kicked out of prep school, launching an adolescent rebellion that would continue on and off for years. 25 years ago this month, my career as a sex educator began when I started training with Berkeley’s Peer Sexuality Outreach. And twenty years ago, with the beginning of the spring quarter at UCLA, I began my teaching career as a Graduate Student Instructor in the Classics department.
GSIs (or TAs, as they were still known then) often lectured in discussion sections. I remember being so nervous before my first lecture (I was not quite 24) that I threw up in the Bunche Hall men’s room before meeting my students. Most were only two or three years my junior. I was excited and terrified, but knew after the first week of teaching that this was the life I wanted.
Two decades later, I’m still teaching. And though I don’t get as nervous as I did in 1991, I still get butterflies from time to time. More to the point, however, I’m an infinitely better teacher than I was back then. And that brings me to my point.
In the current political climate, it’s become fashionable to attack public employees — teachers in particular. Conservatives who have never been enamored of public education hope to take advantage of a weak economy to strip teachers of their pensions, bargaining rights, tenure, and other job protections. These attacks are odious and indefensible, motivated less by concern with fiscal rectitude or the well-being of young people and more by a desire to destroy the progressive public service unions.
One bit of this emerging conservative conventional wisdom drives me nuts: the idea that teachers are at their best when they are new. Complaining about seniority rules that follow the tradition of “last hired, first fired”, education “reformers” often describe older instructors as “dead wood” and the newest and most vulnerable teachers as the ones who do the most valuable work. Even some ostensibly progressive voices agree, arguing that too many senior faculty have “given up”, while the young (and less well-paid) are the ones who are still engaged.
In what other profession do we express such open contempt for experience? Do people board airplanes, saying “Gosh, I really hope our captain and first officer are new at this — enthusiastic young pilots are the kind I trust most!” Do people go to hospitals, asking “Could you please have a resident operate on my child? I’m worried that an older and more experienced surgeon won’t do the job right.” Of course not. In every other profession, experience is valued. In every other profession, seniority is seen not just as a perk for sticking around but as a resource for the entire community.
I am still an enthusiastic professor. I’ve taught 15,000 students (at the least) since I faced that first class twenty years ago this month. Last fall, my in-class teaching evaluations were higher than they’d ever been before. Even as I’ve given the same lectures over and over again — about Cicero and clitorises, about Gilgamesh and intersectionality, about the Pauline epistles and Betty Friedan — I’ve found ways to change and refine what I say. I know I’d shudder if I heard one of my early lectures now, simply because I’ve gotten so much better at the job of delivering a good talk.
Of course, there’s more to teaching than lecturing. I am more compassionate, more patient, and much quicker to recognize when a student is struggling. (I’m also much more ethical — my infamous and inexcusable sexual relationships with students all happened early on in my career.) I can discern the difference between the lack of motivation and the presence of a genuine learning disability in a way I simply couldn’t years ago. Experience has given me these tools. And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that no amount of youthful energy can compensate for the benefit of accumulated wisdom.
I make more money now. My first year as a TA, I was paid $1050 a month. My first year as a full-time prof at Pasadena City College, I made $27,000. I have a base salary of approximately three times that now. (Finishing my doctorate in 1999 boosted my compensation nicely.) Am I worth the salary and the benefits? I don’t know, but I do know I’m worth more than I was when I started. And judging by my colleagues whose work I know well, the same is true for them as well. As with every true calling, as with every profession, experience matters for those of us who sweat and strut in the classrooms.
It’s time we push back against the attempt to de-legitimize our profession, and to dismiss the very real benefits of seniority.
There’s a difference between twenty years of experience and one year of experience twenty times.
Is there a place in seniority rights to discern the difference and make appropriate personnel changes?
Honestly, I get really tired of people asserting that nobody could possibly think that current seniority and tenure policies are bad for students. Of *course* a passionate and experienced teacher is better than a passionate inexperienced teacher. But experience doesn’t count for much if it is coupled with apathy or contempt for one’s job.
I attended public high school, and I had teachers who did not grade a single assignment all year long. I had teachers who steadfastly refused to take any action to protect students who were being bullied, sexually harrassed, or even physically assaulted at school. I had teachers who, quite frankly, did not give a damn about me or any other student in the room. And we all knew it. At least in my district, a student’s only recourse in such a situation was to beg for a transfer into another class.
Thank you so much for this, Hugo. This is an argument I have been having for, must be years now. I am the child of two teachers, and have been sickened at the political scapegoating from all parts of the political spectrum. They were dedicated, caring people, who were never in it for the money, and whose work day, far from ending at three, really never was over.
It’s especially spurious because the only unions that are being attacked are the ones that lean heavily toward the opposition party.
My personal experience says this about teachers: The more experienced teachers are more likely to be either really good, or really bad. Teachers that have used their experience to better themselves and their teaching end up being the “best” type of professors. Teachers that have become apathetic, who just go to pull a paycheck, are the worst.
These attacks are odious and indefensible, motivated less by concern with fiscal rectitude or the well-being of young people and more by a desire to destroy the progressive public service unions.
Yeah, so?
“Progressive public service unions” are a blight on the political landscape. (Also, you’re misspelling “guild”.)
Teacher’s unions take money via coercion – you must join the union and pay dues to work as a teacher – and funnel it to the political candidates of one and only one party. What could be more natural than that the other party resents this, and will take steps to put a stop to it?
Maybe you wouldn’t be undergoing this oh-so-odious assault if your organizations weren’t transparent shills for liberalism, if your organizations occasionally put student welfare ahead of improving the electoral prospects of some numbskull Democratic pol, if your organizations had the basic human decency to operate on a voluntary basis instead of being a fascist gatekeeper that requires paying money – out of a TEACHER’S salary – to fatcat union bosses for the privilege of working at one’s chosen profession.
If every teacher’s union in America poured millions into Sarah Palin’s campaign chest, you’d be cheering their impending demolition in a lusty full-throated voice. They gore YOUR ox, so they’re the devil. Spare us the platitudes about how wonderful the union is and how awful it is that their corrupt and crappy game is getting yanked off the field.
In what other profession do we express such open contempt for experience?
My field (software engineering). And it’s not “open contempt”, but that the field moves rapidly and most experienced people tend to swap functions (architecture, management, etc).
But Hugo, you’re not arguing for experience as sole determinant of pay. When I listened to the debates, the union leaders didn’t seem to think so either, but had trouble articulating what exact mechanism they’ll use to determine performance (and unfortunately test scores, while measurable, seems to be an inaccurate metric)
Robert.
A blog called “Gateway Pundit” has a number of posts covering local news reports of the Mad Madison festivities for the last couple of weeks.
Violence, death threats, vandalism, harassment.
In addition, the progressive public service unions in MN average higher pay and bennies than the private sector unions and other workers who are to be taxed to pay the unions to help elect “progressive” folks whose primary goal is feathering their own nest.
BTW. When unions pay non-union people to walk the picket line, the pay is frequently below minimum wage.
Experience ? seniority rules. There’s a world of difference between counting experience as a factor in whether an employee is capable at their job and making it the primary or sole criterion as to whether they are retained irrespective of their competence or capability.
For decades, teachers’ unions used the issue of the quality of public education and the implied lifelong impact thereof on children as a political bludgeon to garner a bigger and bigger piece of the fiscal pie for the public education system that they dominated and to insulate it from public accountability as much as possible. Then, we increasingly developed hard data, despite the obdurate opposition of those same unions, that revealed that when we compared our country to other countries or different communities in the country in terms of educational outcomes, that the public education system was doing a terrible job. Unfortunately for the teachers’ unions, we decided to take seriously their long-standing claims about how important education was, and to start doing things to reform the system that put the unions’ entrenched interests at risk. That the response of the unions has been dominated by the same old shibboleths about the importance of teachers while ignoring what we have learned about how flawed the system is as it exists, or mouthing inapplicable blather about “corporate greed” or “tax cuts for the rich”, reveals how little credibility they and their defenders have left in the education debate.
I wonder what would happen if the “free market” was applied to the military. Make General’s commission only. No Osama, no pay. And a bonus for ending the wars quickly…..
How come the Neo Con’s don’t advocate that one…..
This post is well reasoned, but I believe it misses two critical points:
First, there is a difference between furor over tenure and a belief that “younger is better”. Hugo characterizes both as “What other profession penalizes experience?” However, the former could also be accurated phrased “What other profession ignores ability when handing out raises?”
While some individuals are likely in the former camp (old teachers = dead wood), many oppose tenure because of the latter (salary should be based on ability, not time served).
Second, teachers are responsible for one of the most vulnerable populations in the country – children. There cannot be any excuse for an elementary school delivering functionally illiterate children to a middle school. At some point failure must be accepted, and it must be acknowledged that teachers, as the front line of education, share some of the blame. A system that does not acknowledge this, and act to correct it, instead providing steady raises for time served, is fundamentally broken and failing a truly vulnerable group. The lifetime burden of being unable to read at a fourth grade level is devastating, and it is wrong to ask children to bear that burden alone.