By Cameron Bocanegra | Reporter
There are thousands of classrooms children file through, day after day. For the first thirteen years of their life, a child is put in classrooms for seven hours a day and expected to develop into a highly functional member of society.
Within every classroom, there is almost an insurmountable amount of skill levels; not every child develops at the same rate. Their entire academic experience is almost identical because the teachers are forced to teach to the test.
We have all been in this classroom. In the schooling environment, some of us played a minor role and others played major ones. You may have raised your hand with the wrong answer in mind or always arrived on time to produce your average test scores.
These were the most important developmental years of your life, or so you were told. Who do you owe them to? You owe them to yourself, right? You alone did the work and produced the decent SAT scores. Can you name on your left hand the individuals who taught you everything you claim to already know? We forget to thank the teachers that we owe our education to. It is a thankless job.
I will agree that not every teacher is a good one. In education, there are an unfair amount of teachers who fell into the profession as their “Plan C,” deciding last minute to get certified after they could not find a job in their area.
There are also teachers you cannot recall; however, for every one that did not care, there is a teacher you remember who cared and affected your life enough to make you listen to the meaning behind the boring roar of the classroom. Their lesson plans found a way to tower over the monotony and the useless role call. Dr. Michael F. Korpi, a Baylor film professor stated in a recent lecture, “School is simply a warehouse for children, one that only allows the children’s own parents to leave and go to work.”
For an average of $30,000 a year in Texas, teachers choose to be the blame for everything their students do not accomplish. These are the people that choose kids everyday. They are professionals that serve the public in the same way that doctors, firefighters, police officers and other public servants aim to do.
Why is it then that they fall so low on the totem pole of respect? Why is it then that a state’s education budget is one of the first things to be cut? When this happens, the teachers take the hit within the classroom walls. We need to start placing a higher value on not just education, but the educators that have been selflessly leading and raising the youth.
