I recently read an article in BusinessWeek that depressed me even more than the financial mess. The article was about the need to treat employees well and is available here.

I recently chatted with a hot dog server at a Costco lunch counter. He said he’d held several jobs at Costco during the past five years—since leaving his job as a high school teacher. So I asked the obvious question: “Why do you stay here serving hot dogs?” “Because of the way I’m treated,” he said. “I actually make a bit more than I did teaching. Plus, I know that sooner or later I’ll be given a bigger job—perhaps one with some management responsibility, and that’s exciting to me.” I’m still looking to find the employee who isn’t favorably disposed toward Costco

I have nothing against hot dog man at Costco. But it’s ridiculous that you can make more and be treated better than as a teacher. If he messes up, the customer gets heart burn. If a teacher messes up, a kid gets turned off to learning forever. Stories of lousy pay / poor treatment for teachers are cliché, but this one takes the cake (or is it the hot dog?).

My freshman year of college, my future roommate and I had both toyed with becoming teachers. We quickly decided against it since it was clear even in 1995 that this is where the world was going to.

I know there were great future teachers in my classes and I’m sure there are great future teachers studying now. They love their subject matter and more importantly, love kids. But… but, there’s a lot of horrible ones too. John & his roommate and lots of other potentially good teachers never sign up for this. So there is a smaller pool of teachers and hence more demand for lousy ones. Two events from my college days really drove this home to me.

Abstract Algebra is a hard class - it’s toward the end of the curriculum for undergrad math major. When I took the class at Purdue, most of the class future high school math teachers, with a few industry bound folks. (There was an honors version for the future Phds.) When we got the results from our tests back, the class average was in the 40’s. One of the other non-future math teachers and yours truly scored in the 90’s. The class size was ~15, so 2 90’s could raise the class average quite a bit. (7 points if the class had 15 and the average was 45 points counting us.) It’s not that we were smarter. We cared and worked hard. The future high school teachers seemed not only to have checked out (drinking etc, which they were), but they were not even the slightest passionate about any type of math from what I could tell.

A far worse experienced happened in a Brit Lit class. One of my classmates was a future English teacher. I asked him once what he was reading for pleasure. He told me that he hated reading and was proud of it. This really, really pissed me off. I asked him why the hell he wanted to be an English teacher with that attitude. We had some words. Let’s leave it at that. I’m sure he’s still an English teacher since he doesn’t care about anything - not the bad pay or treatment or the fact he’s making other kids hate reading.

I compare this to my experience in grade school and high school. Most of my teachers were geeks in their various fields. My English teachers lived / ate / breathed literature. My history teachers could tell you anything about anything, even outside their fields. I heard it 2nd hand (but I believe it) that as our Calculus teacher chaperoned us during our senior trip, she read an advanced math book for pleasure. The few that were not geeks in there fields were always younger.

My premise here is of course you have to care about the subject you’re teaching as well as kids. Maybe at grade school where you just cleanup runny noses all day that’s not true, but even at high school the specialization you need demands passion in your subject area. Kids will pick up on this – they’re not stupid, even if some of their teachers are.

So - if you know a good teacher be extra nice to them. And be nice to the hot dog guy at Costco, too.