I have come to the end of the summer semester, grinding out grades and prepping for the next set of classes to start in a mere seven days.
For some reason I have been getting a lot of responses from the feedback I have given to my students this semester. I cannot account for the interaction or the reaction I am getting from them.
It is unusual that I hear anything from them except for the “why didn’t I get an “A” on such-and-such assignment, when it is clearly a “C” at best, and sometimes even that is a stretch.
Or, “I hate to ask, but can I have an extension on such-and-such assignment because…” followed by any litany of excuse or reasons they can come up with.
Keep in mind these are college students, not middle-schoolers, and their creativity never ceases to amaze me. What they don’t know when you have been doing this as long as I have, there isn’t much I haven’t heard in way of “reasons for missing an assignment.”
But this semester I have been getting some “thanks for the feedback” and “it seems as though you really care about teaching.”
I’ll take it like a thirsty nomad in the desert.
And then I started thinking…..
Teaching is a thankless profession. It truly is.
We educators work from a perspective of deficiency. We never have enough funding. Enough supplies. Enough salary, benefits, or raises, and contrary to popular opinion, we never have enough time off between semesters. When most folks think we are enjoying all the major holidays with all that free time off, we are busy upgrading our classes, improving our lectures, and we are taking professional development courses to stay on top of learning trend and technological advances and working hard to implement them into our courses for the next semester. We constantly must tweak our classes to comply with the changing federal and state rules of ADA and student learning objectives.
We burn the candle at both ends either grading, prepping or recalibrating our classes, and we burn the midnight oil with the student(s) who need that extra push, that extra explanation, that extra nudge of confidence to keep them in class.
I heard a conversation once – it is dated now but it is still so significant. A group of professionals were sitting around a table talking about what they each made. One says, “Oh I make six figures a year,” and another says, “I make hundreds of thousands off my dividend investments.” And other one says, “I make huge profits off my factory output.”
There was one professional the table who had not yet commented until one of the others asked him, “What do you make?”
And the teacher replied, “I make a difference.”
That really just sums it up for me.
We don’t see the lasting rewards of our labor. We see the immediate effect when students such as yourself take the time to let us know that we have impacted their studies, their point of view, their awareness of the world around them, and perhaps even their direction in life.
I measure my paycheck in the daily success of my students.
And I measure a pay raise when I hear back from students next semester, next year, or five years on, when they have achieved their Masters’ or their Ph.ds’, or the career of their choice, or that they have married, had children, are proud homeowners, or have otherwise achieved their dreams.
There isn’t enough gold in the world that can top that paycheck.