5.3.7 Teacher Motivation

The lack of ideal leads to a confusion of goals. For example, I think it's a real confusion of goals for teachers to think that they should be motivated primarily through personal dedication. You should have dedicated teachers. I see nothing wrong with dedicated teachers but I see something terribly wrong with a society that wants to see dedicated
teachers but not pay them anything. That's very wrong. Just because teaching should be a service profession doesn't mean they shouldn't be compensated well. If teaching is as important as we say it is, teachers should be compensated at the high end of society rather than the low end. Unfortunately, teaching is starting to look better as a profession
only because the options are starting to look worse. Which is not at all the way that I had hoped things would play out. But right now a $27,000 starting salary in the Norfolk Public Schools looks grand in terms of a lot of the options in the service industry. Twenty-seven thousand dollars is a bare living salary for a beginning professional. The
problem is, it doesn't go much above forty and if you're going to have a professional lifestyle you would have to have a two income family. Whereas if you become a doctor or lawyer the income potential is much higher and I think that's unfortunate. We do need dedicated teachers but let's allow dedicated teachers to also be compensated. I think it's a confusion of goals to confuse dedication with compensation. I think you need both. Teacher satisfaction is only achieved from teaching academic learners. Unfortunately, too many physical education
teachers are frustrated athletes. They never quite made it as athletes in terms of the big time. So they live vicariously through their students in terms of wanting their students to achieve that which they could not. That's a gross generalization. But the results of that is that most PE teachers would rather teach gifted PE kids rather than the ordinary kid. The Physical Education teacher does not get a lot of satisfaction out of teaching recreation or fitness to just ordinary kids. The physical education teacher wants to deal with the physical education elite. That's the system. It's not so much the teacher's fault as it is the system's fault because the system encourages that. Incidentally, it's not just physical education, take a look at the English teachers. They want to teach the gifted writers and about literature, they certainly don't want to spend a lot of time teaching grammar and usage and writing fundamentals. That's not what's exciting to the English teachers. We've created a system where teachers feel rewarded for teaching the kids that are going to be successful almost in spite of them rather than because of them. That's a crazy system. The real challenge of teaching is to take kids wherever they are and bring them forward. The best example of teachers who are motivated to do that are special education teachers. In this regard the special education teachers are closer to the ideal
than any other teachers because these teachers really do gain their sense of accomplishment through the incremental accomplishments of their students at whatever level they find them. And I think that's a really fine model for all teachers. In many ways its more exciting and challenging for a teacher to take someone whose life is transformed by a particular educational experience than someone with a silver spoon in their mouth. This is one of the reasons that in many ways I enjoy teaching at ODU better than I enjoyed teaching at Stanford. Because at Stanford the students were going to successful in spite of what I did. I might add a little as we went along. But here at ODU I get many kids where I can really make the difference. I've suggested alternatives they didn't know about and constructed different opportunities. Give me a chance and I'll try and twist your arm and send you off to China to teach English for a year. And that's something that's available to you and yet most of you don't think that's available to you at all. Your blinders are on in terms of the options in your life. Either you can think of all sorts of reasons why not or you never though about it. Most often times we just never think about the options that are there and I think that its really exciting for me as a teacher and I think that teachers all ought to get excited about opening up alternatives for students whoever they are and whatever level they find them. And to find a challenge in teaching all of our students I think is really the challenge of the profession and it's a definite confusion of goals when teachers get trained with the attitude
that the real success as a teacher comes only from teaching the top performers. I think that's a confusion of goals. A very common one, but a very awful one.

	Why are special education teachers good role models for other teaching professionals?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Smith is a special education teacher that works with five different teachers within a seventh grade cluster at a middle school in Chicago. Although she only deals with twenty percent of the students in the classes that she sits in on, Mrs. Smith has to write and Individualized Education Program (IEP) for each of them that can run as long as twenty pages. She then must monitor all of them daily in order to assess their progress and adjust goals in the IEP if necessary. The teachers that have these students included in their classes sometimes become very frustrated because they feel that they will never get though with their portion of the work associated with the individuals with disabilities. How can Mrs. Smith be a great role model, mentor, and encourager for the teachers that she works with in this cluster of pre-teenagers?	Answer Here