Teachers with Benefits
How Employee-Sponsored Health Benefits Can Make Teaching Sick
All teachers have their favorites. Of course, we do. It’s impossible not to appreciate the charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent of certain students.
One of my favorites was Erick.
When he was in one of my kindergarten classes, he exhibited a maturity and brightness that was rare for a five-year-old. He was often the sole student to pick up on my sarcasm. I’d crack a smart-alecky joke and then hear one single “ha!” coming from Erick’s seat. He was great.
By the time he reached fifth grade, he was in the gifted program at our school and readying himself for middle school. His mother was seeking placement for him in a gifted magnet located nearby in Hollywood. Although he hadn’t qualified for intellectual giftedness, there was still hope to get him qualified to attend the school by using his the record of his stellar grades and test scores.
I was no longer teaching kindergarten; I was an out-of-classroom teacher and therefore able to keep track of Erick’s progress through the years.
His mother had approached me about her options for getting him into the magnet middle school, and so I approached his 5th grade teacher to ask him to write a letter on Erick’s behalf testifying to his good grades, leadership capabilities, and other achievements. His teacher readily agreed.
However, the letter the teacher composed and handed in to me was so terribly half-assed and sloppy that I became upset.
I confronted Erick’s 5th grade teacher and asked that he re-write the letter because I was too embarrassed to give what he had handed in to the mother.
This became an argument, of course.
I wasn’t in a strong position. I wasn’t the teacher’s superior and as a colleague I had no right to ask him to complete any task or even challenge the quality of his work.
Truthfully, I was totally out of bounds by asking him to do this favor.
After going back and forth with him for a bit as to why the letter was insufficient, I castigated him as to how badly the letter was written, and then went on to comment on how he was not doing a good job generally as a teacher either. (I know! I was escalating the situation!)
He responded in turn that I myself wasn’t doing a good job in my position and that nobody liked me. (The gloves and hoop earrings were now coming off.)
We were both escalating until, as a retort to my accusations of his shoddy teaching, he then blurted out, “I’m only here for the insurance,” referring to the generous medical benefits provided by our employment as educators at that time.
He shut me up with that one.
His truth-telling revelation made me both angry and sad. Even if he really didn’t mean what he said, I understood then that a malice is built into the structure of public schooling.
The cruelty is systemic, not personal. He didn’t care or not care about Erick.
He was indifferent. He was just there for the insurance.
This teacher also ran a small business outside of his teaching duties. Many teachers have part-time jobs, side hustles, and small businesses.
As a teacher, he probably was rightly exhausted by both having to teach a fifth-grade class and run his small business in his spare time.
This brutal American society makes everyone fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog way. And in this situation his business was his business not Erick’s education.
Because medical insurance is tied to our employment, there are many people who cling to jobs they despise simply to maintain their health insurance. I have known many teachers who sole impetus for teaching was not even to collect their salary per se but instead assure the continuance of their medical benefits for themselves and their families.
Essentially this teacher, in particular, was making his own economically rational choice.
He was a self-employed small business owner who supplemented his business income with a teacher salary and saved loads of money by siphoning medical insurance and a pension from his teaching gig.
He was doing what was best for himself. And who could really blame him?
But it was also obvious that his teaching was corrupted by this job-juggling. He was only able to offer a bare minimum to his students, if that. Teaching was a secondary concern in his complicated economic life. Erick getting into a magnet school was way at the bottom of his priority list, and it showed in the half-assed letter he wrote.
Teachers can be made cruel.
They are exhausted into brutality or indifference. So many educators are simply drained to the point of depletion. They just can’t give one more f*** over to an American society that purports to promote freedom and liberty and happiness but economically chains people to an employment they come to despise.
Doing the bare minimum becomes a survival tactic for many professionals—and the collateral damage is the children and their educations.