Absolutelee.com

I got to tell you a story!

If you’ve looked at my bio, you’ll remember that I’m a high school teacher–math. This is a job I love, but that I’m outgrowing. Specifically, now it’s time for me to be an entrepreneur.

If you don’t already know this, teaching public school is a very demanding job. I teach a lower-middle income, racially mixed group. Suffice it to say, the kids I teach bring a lot of baggage to school everyday. This baggage gets in their way.

I teach kids whose mothers don’t really care about them. I teach kids whose daddies were only part of their lives for the twenty minutes it took to conceive them. (Twenty minutes? Heck, they’re such losers, probably only one minute.)

Despite the difficulties, I’ve looked forward to coming to work every single day since I’ve been a teacher. This is truly a rewarding career.

So, now that you’ve got my take on teaching, let’s get on with the story.

I get about 25 minutes to eat lunch. I eat in a lounge with a bunch of other teachers.

The other day, I was eating and a group near me was discussing the public’s perception of public school teachers.

Their contention was that we do not get enough respect, and that we get even less respect then they used to.

Of course, being the remarkably opinionated person that I am, I chimed in.

I said that I thought the public respects teachers quite a lot. Now, it’s true that we don’t get the respect we used to, but then who does? With movies like Shrek, which I won’t let my kids see because I think the donkey is an ass , and the general cheapening and coarsening of our society, no one gets the respect they deserve any more.

I tried to prove my point by citing a USA Today poll I saw a year or so ago ranking professions by respect. Doctors were number one. That should come as no surprise. Guess what profession was number two. Teachers!

To counter my objection, they insisted that if we were respected more we would be paid more.

Look, I’m all for making more money. (That’s one of the reasons I’m leaving teaching.) But the amount of money someone makes has nothing to do with whether they’re respected or not. How much money you make ultimately gets back to simple supply and demand. Teachers make what they make because school boards don’t need to pay more to get the quality teacher they want to hire.

You could argue that the career (and ultimately the salary) you choose is closely related to self-respect, but that’s a different story altogether.

By this time, they were getting very frustrated with me. I understand, I can be a very frustrating person.

As we continued to talk about all of this, it became apparent to me that they didn’t like their jobs very much. As a matter of fact, there was very little about their jobs they did like.

They weren’t paid enough. Redistricting had screwed up our school. The students were worthless. The administrators were bunglers.

Now, I disagreed with nearly everything they said, but that’s not the part that interests me about this.

I was fascinated with the fact that we were working in the same school, teaching the same students, yet I was having a totally different experience from theirs.

Well, once lunch was over we all dispersed to our various classrooms and duties.

These people, whom I actually like quite a lot, had spent a lot of energy defending their view of their world. Why?

I’m not totally sure, but I think at base, they’re unhappy because they want to be unhappy. They must get something personal out of being so frustrated.

It’s something like this. If you don’t value yourself enough, wouldn’t it be easier to put the blame on your circumstances than on yourself?

So, if at base, these folks really do not value their roll as teachers, wouldn’t it be easier to place the blame for that on their external world rather than look inside and begin the process of real change?

I believe it was Eckhardt Tolle who said something like get the inside right and the outside will take care of itself.

Anyway, after lunch I felt like a dump truck had pulled up in front of me and dumped a load of fertilizer on my head!

I’m disassociating myself from these guys, not because I dislike them (I don’t), but because their bitter view of their world gets all over me, then I have to work on spiritually and emotionally cleaning myself off.

All of this just because I wasn’t careful who I ate lunch with!

So, you want a quick hack that will help change your life?

Be very careful who you eat lunch with!

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under General, Self-help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.