Schooling.
“Teachers are paid more than they deserve and they essentially work part-time,” says the man I’ve never met, and if I had enough time in the day to go back and forth with him on this I might ask him to explain how he learned, all by himself, all the words and sentences he’s now using to form his bullshit arguments. I might tell him about the countless unpaid hours that good teachers spend at home, awake in bed in the middle of the night, on the commute, coming up with new strategies to engage one student without alienating three others. I might tell him that if he had to perform the daunting and extraordinary task asked of teachers during their alleged part-time hours with the minimal resources, increasing benchmark demands, and uncertain administrative support that far too many teachers in this country receive in part because of ignorant blowhards like him, he’d crawl home weeping and broken.
I might do that if I expected the argument would amount to anything more than a pair of raging beasts growling and snapping at each other over a hunk of raw meat on the floor between them, long past the point either of them were even still hungry. Instead, I write this here to try and funnel the anger out of myself, to release the pressure on the brain for a moment. I regret not having the energy to fight all the time, but I regret more that there are so many fights in the first place.
Creative Control 