In Lieu of Money: The Rewards of Teaching
A NEW voice in the great educational debate has said that teachers are recruited from among either the dedicated or the incompetent. The remark, of course, is a variant of the older adage that people who can, do, and those who cannot, teach. Both the original and the variant are, to be sure, only half-truths at best. A student named Jay, who smelled of manure and spouted outrageous opinions like a soapbox orator, taught me that teaching can indeed have rewards not measured in money but, on the other hand, not requiring the kind of saintly commitment suggested by the word dedication. My lesson from Jay did not put steak on my table instead of hamburger or pay off a desk drawerful of pediatrician's bills, but it did convince me that I had stumbled into the right occupation. At the time, I needed convincing. I had encountered nothing to stir dedication, and I was not resigned to an admission of incompetence. As a young college history instructor, I had awakened to the brute fact that after eight long and expensive years of college training, I was earning less money than a shoe salesman. What was even worse, the future did not promise much advancement. In that year, all college professors received a national average income about equal to the average family income of the nation as a whole. I had heard that teaching compensated for proverbial low pay and status with such advantages as job satisfaction, long vacations, and low-pressure working conditions. But I was dubious-until Jay came along. I first met him as a "problem" student. He had enrolled for a survey course in Western Civilization that I was teaching at the urban nightschool division of a large state university. He was not a "reading problem" or an "underachiever," or even a "discipline problem," at least in any usual meaning of the jargon. He was a problem because he stood out in the class like a warty nose and because he threw himself with such abandon into class discussions that he antagonized everybody in the class, including me. He was a tall, bony youth in his early twenties, several years older than the other freshman students. He had a great shock of explosive black hair, and for the twelve weeks of the course he did not consult a barber about it. He wore soiled blue denim trousers and an equally dirty and rumpled blue denim jacket. He talked in loud, booming, rural tones, the kind of speech that vaudeville farmers