Professor. Just the word elicits respect, and respect is something we don’t have or show a lot of in 2018 America. We call physicians ‘doc’, coaches, bosses, aunts and uncles by their first names, and almost everyone else ‘dude’ … except for politicians and lawyers. But even the most confident of us wants to impress when dining or conversing with a professor.

Teacher doesn’t have the same shine, does it?

Teachers seem more human, more approachable, and generally speaking are not shown the type of respect college professors enjoy.

Why?



College professors are almost invariably required to hold a master’s degree, as are secondary school teachers in many states and all teachers in some states. Many professors hold doctorate degrees, as do an increasing number of teachers. College professors need only that master’s degree in a subject area to get hired, while a prospective teacher’s college course load must include several psychology, child psychology, child development and classroom management courses along with courses in teaching strategies and testing as well as advanced courses in their subject area.

Teachers are also required to be scrutinized and licensed according to each state’s standards – professors are not. It is therefore difficult to deduce that professors are more qualified than teachers.

As for the actual teaching, with all due respect to professors everywhere, pontificating in front of a hundred youngsters that desperately need a good grade, writing books that you can then require all your students to buy and keeping office hours does not even begin to compare to the struggles and rewards of teaching in a public school; hands dirty, barrels of patience, nuts and bolts teaching.

If professors aren’t better qualified to teach and they aren’t necessarily better teachers (in fact, professors can be horrible teachers and keep their jobs based on social or media status, authoring popular publications or other notoriety), then why do professors garner more respect than teachers?

Professors have it made.

The first huge advantage they have over teachers is that their students want to be in class and are highly motivated to do well. The other, to be blunt, is that professors do not have to put up with any crap. Mouth off in a college course, and at the professor’s discretion you can be banished from the course without any regard for the fact that you’ve already paid over five hundred dollars in tuition for the class or that it is the last credit you need to graduate. You. Are. Outta Here!

Obviously, dealing with a class of students that is wondering whether there’ll be chocolate milk for lunch and a lecture hall filled with students that are looking forward to a cold beer after class present different challenges for instructors, as well as different expectations from their employers. It is reasonable to expect teachers to learn, practice and refine classroom management skills, as kids definitely will be kids, and as noted above, most teachers receive training in this area. The issue, is the line.

Is chewing gum worth a demerit?

Is throwing a ball at another student’s head worth being deprived of recess for a week?

Does talking back to a teacher warrant a time-out, detention or corporal punishment (still legal and being practiced in nineteen states)?

When does a student’s behavior warrant action outside the auspices of classroom management and justify a trip to see the principal? The line gets trampled and dissipates until it is all but forgotten. And if a student does get removed from class, will the principal take action or just scold him and send him back for the teacher to deal with again? This is some of the aforementioned crap, up with which professors do not have to put! But wait, there’s more!

Try telling the head of the math department at a university that she has to spend forty-five minutes on ‘lunch duty’ every day…

…and you can start looking for another person to head up your math department. Bus duty can be a boon, especially if you’re a smoker that hasn’t had a chance to get to the break room this morning, and standing around on the playground while there are papers to grade and students waiting for help can be as crazy-making as trying to drive from place to place in Seattle.

And then there’s parents. Parents that believe that since they went to school they know how to do a teacher’s job. Parents that believe that paying taxes makes them the teacher’s boss. Parents that believe that any demand they make should be honored because that is THEIR kid and they have final say in any circumstance. Parents, the concerns of whom can almost always be best addressed by them attending class with their child to both witness behavior and get an accurate idea of how the teacher runs his class, but are almost never willing to do so because they need to go to work. This indication that their job is more important than the teacher’s will always coincide with a claim that the education of their child is the most important consideration. This does a number of things:

It puts the teacher in a no-win, as it dismisses the logical and recommended course of action because it is inconvenient for the parent, and makes the teacher a babysitter any way you slice it; one that, at least on occasion, has to take crap. And that’s why teachers are not respected in the same way professors are.

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No matter how much admiration we may have for a teacher, her abilities, the way he handles the students, her knowledge, his expertise, in the back of our minds they are also the reason that we can go to work or take classes or just enjoy a few silent moments during the day. This isn’t going to change, but being a babysitting service by default does not mean that schools need to embrace, enable or encourage that role as a part of their existence. Contrarily, it should be adamantly resisted in the name of education and the future of our children and our nation.

Ask a teacher if sending the following note home, and sticking to what is says, would allow them to do a better job of doing their job, and watch the smile grow: