I can't claim to know more than Matt Damon about teachers, and I'm certainly not as eloquent, but I feel like he does them a disservice
with this line:
“A teacher wants to teach. Why else would you take a
shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really
loved to do it?”
As I probably sexily remarked years ago
when I was running for President:
But oh, we tell ourselves, teaching is a higher
calling, teachers do it cause they love it! They’d do it for free;
they’re thrilled to be getting anything! Meanwhile we pay janitors
at these schools twice as much – I guess we think of janitors as being
an ambitious, money-hungry conniving bunch, so it’s okay to pay them.
We applaud Wall Street hotshots who sit at a big desk moving money
around on the internet and own three Porsches, but get bent out of shape
whenever the people that stay with our children all day, teach them how
to read and write, try to teach them right and wrong, protect them and
drive them to away games get uppity and demand a real salary. We expect
them to do all the above for almost nothing cause that’s the way it
always has been (ie has historically been a woman’s job), and then we
wonder why we’re getting dumber and dumber every year. It’s not that
Johnny can’t read - it’s that instead of becoming teachers, the people
who COULD teach Johnny to read took the job of placing those cakes in
the urinals since it pays more and you get pissed on less. So instead
of turning on some crocodile tears and inventing an aunt who "dedicated
her life to teaching", I will bust my hump to make being a teacher a
desirable career for the first time since "Wild Things."
See the full Damon joint below.
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