More (and better) links and resources for helping Japan, plus a touching video from one of Jenn in Japan‘s own students. (You might cry watching it, but it’s a heartwarming clip, which is a nice change of pace — I needed to reason to smile today.)
Please visit this post and click on the links provided there. Japan needs us.
It feels like the tragedies in Japan are unending. It is so easy to be overwhelmed in times like these with the images and videos and stories we are inundated with on the news. With the level of suffering and grief that is rising in our faces, sometimes we need to take a break and turn off the TV and X out of that web page. However, for millions of people, there is no convenient button to push that will make these realities go away. They have los … Read More
via Jenn in Japan
Jenn in Japan has listed more resources for helping Japan. I posted similar lists following the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, but Jenn is actually on the ground, in Japan right now, and I’m going to trust her to know far better than I do what are the best ways to reach out to Japan. So please visit her blog and check out her expanded list of resources.
How do you pick up the pieces of a broken world? By bearing each other’s burdens. I would ask you to stand on this hill, with these people, and watch everything you’ve ever loved, to watch the people you’ve loved be swept helplessly out of your reach. I do not mean to continually assault you gut wrenching images needlessly. However the point is … there is such great need! This is very difficu … Read More
via Jenn in Japan
Part of my 11-11 reading list includes literary journals and magazines, and because I want to support them as much as I can (I rely on them for publications, after all!), I’ve decided to try to read at least one full issue of a different magazine each month. But it’s fairly difficult to do that with print journals while I’m still living in the UAE: I have plenty of access to some of the mainstream magazines that happen to also publish fiction (like Atlantic or the New Yorker), but I want as much as possible to support smaller and/or newer magazines and journals, which are harder to get over here.
The good news is that the Internet offers plenty of exceptional literary publications online, including online content for magazines that also appear in print.
Last month I subscribed via RSS feed to the online content of Annalemma, a rising (some would say risen, and I won’t argue) star in the literary/arts world. They are only a few years old now, but they started out with a clear vision, a strong sense of dedication, and a LOT of creative talent, and they’re already getting a lot of attention in the literary world, with comparisons to The New Yorker, except it’s all art and fiction with only the occasional feature piece, and it’s aimed at a younger, fresher, hipper generation.
I haven’t read any of the print issues yet (I’m going to look for them in bookstores when I return to the States), but the online content so far has been excellent. The fiction (they don’t do poetry) is fresh and full of energy, much of it formally or thematically experimental without ever feeling flashy or overtly weird (in either the vernacular or the technical senses). Think Kevin Brockmeier or David Maizenberg or China Miéville.
For me, the fiction is the real attraction, but the artwork is always worth a look, and their occasional blog features are pretty cool, too. Of particular note in their online content are the reportage from the various readings and literary/artistic events they attend and the book reviews they sometimes run.
When I say I want to support new(er) literary magazines, I mostly mean financially, but I know times are tight and in fact I can’t really subscribe to print issues right now anyway. But I also want to support these publications vocally, and browsing online and/or subscribing to their RSS feed is free, so do yourself a favor and check out Annalemma.
Some (relatively) recent online stories that rocked my socks:
Other features, from the blog, that are awesome:
For more about my 11-11 project, check out my initial post on the challenge or all the posts in my 11-11 category.
For more on what I’m currently reading, check out my Bookshelf.
I wanted to write a haiku today, for Japan. But nothing I could write would ever feel sufficient enough, or delicate enough, or helpful enough.
Then I found this video post from Jenn, an American teaching in Japan, and her words are excellent.
Better still, she offers links and suggestions for ways to help Japan and the Japanese people, and she urges not only donations but also activism. Please, after you watch her video, visit those links.
(Later, if you have time, read Jenn’s most recent post, in which she does, somehow, amazingly, find the strength to compose a poem for Japan.)
As an update- yes, I felt the earthquake and am experiencing aftershocks. My town lies on the southern coast of Hokkaido and was partly evacuated. The tsunami surge did raise the water levels here but **I am fine.** Thankfully, all of my friends have been safely located. The Tohoku region of Japan is in dire need of prayer and assistance. The death toll is steadily rising and the damage is catastrophic. Please pray. [youtube=http://www.youtube.co … Read More
via Jenn in Japan
Some publications news: I have two new stories in the March issue of Red Fez, “Still Alive” and “Dream with Enough Conviction.”
You might recognize “Dream with Enough Conviction”: an earlier draft of it appeared here about ten months ago, as a Writer’s Notebook entry on music and fiction.
And you might recognize Red Fez, because last September they published (and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart) my story “Kamikaze.”
Seriously, go check out Red Fez. They were already cool when I started reading them several months ago, but they’re growing like crazy and are using web publishing to its fullest potential, publishing not only great poetry and fiction and now articles and essays, but also artwork, comics, and video and audio performance pieces. Truly awesome stuff going on over there.
For links to some of my other publications, check out my Publications page.
This is a bit embarrassing, but what the hell — the essence of exercises is to attempt to write, and sometimes the results can be ugly. Besides, I have the defense that I wrote this almost twenty years ago, when I was just some high school kid who didn’t know anything about anything.
I awoke in the temple with a feeling of inferiority and a sense of awe that belittled me and everything in my sight save the rocks. I glanced around at the sepulchral walls and shivered in awesome wonder. Soft wet shifts of dirt came from below, as though the sweaty earth was morphing under the great weight of the stones. Brief rays of delicate light dripped through the dark sheet of clouds overhead. The cold that radiated, just out of reach, from the stones, the soil, and the sky drew me away from myself and into the world of the necromantic druids. I rose from my resting place and began to circumnavigate the mystic Stonehenge.
I glided past the fallen behemoths while the spirits of the long-dead worshipers of some ancient god cried for me to join them as they rode the breeze. Sweetly rotten scents of decay were carried to me in a gentle breath and then were gone, following the paths of their vagabond souls. The stones glistened with the soft sheen of post-storm silence, and they watched over me in solemn supremacy. Subtle grays surrounded me in claustrophobic circumspection, alienating me. Gargantuan towers of weatherworn bluestone loomed over me, and shadows crawled over their surfaces like living pits of abysmal depths. Tiny spheres of water, reminiscent of their raindrop cousins, crept down the time-soothed sides of organic iron and were lost in the vacuum of the lightless shadows. I followed them into the infinity and lost myself as well. I fell to the ground.
The moisture of dark rains and the translucent histories was soaked into the soil so that it gave way at my impact. Thin whisps of steam rose around me as the morning warmed the blue-white frost covering the earth. My back became scratched and gritty and my fingers grew numb. I was being enveloped by the frigidity of the ground and the malleability of the loam I lay in. My mind began to slip into the moist and musky sands of time. Then the thunder cracked and my attention was drawn from threatening unconsciousness to the sky above me.
The swirls of deep purple, mauve and sunlit lavender I had awakened to had condensed into a huge writhing mass of blue-black, slate, and obsidian. Dark lightning exploded within the clouds, backlighting the massive cauliflower thunderheads in the foreground while illuminating the gloomy, lumbering giants of the upper atmosphere. Shrill, icy cold shot into my face and I jumped to my feet just as the storm began its tantrum. Glowing raindrops fell to the ancient dirt beneath me and crashed into the stolid, impervious stones as the heavens were torn to flailing rags by the harsh winds and freezing rains and fiery flashes of tainted light.
I hastily started toward home, looking back only once to the shrine. That was the last time I saw the living soil that glowed greenish brown and the stoic rocks that exuded the deep regal purple and grey of ageless majesty as they sat and proved immortal in the face of the savage sky above Stonehenge.
So, that was pretty awful. Some fun attempts at color description, maybe, especially considering I’m color blind, but really pretty cheesy overall.
There are a couple of interesting things to note here, though: First, this is just a simple description exercise. My high school English teacher (I forget which grade) showed us an image of Stonehenge (I think it was a watercolor painting) and told us to describe it as vividly as we could. A classic beginning exercise, used almost like a stretch and warm-up before a workout, just something to limber up our powers of observation and get the vocabulary flowing. But what’s interesting is that I couldn’t help but try and turn this simply descriptive exercise into a story. It’s a bad story badly written (can you tell I was reading a lot of Lovecraft at the time? I still enjoy Lovecraft, but bad Lovecraft pastiche is some of the worst writing you can do), but it’s still an attempt at story. I felt the narrative was somehow part of the descriptive process, that I couldn’t see the image without also seeing a story.
The other thing that’s interesting about this is that I still have it. I’m a notorious pack rat, especially when it comes to drafts and revisions of my work. I actually have whole file cabinet drawers full of single stories, several dozen drafts of the same idea and/or a couple dozen copies of the same draft with workshop comments scribbled on them, even sometimes the original handwritten notebook pages or backs of receipts with lines of dialogue I never even used. One of my graduate professors finally instilled in me the ability to let go of the work and toss out old drafts and notes and cheap ideas that are just never going to work, but I still take my time doing it and I still manage to hold onto a LOT of paper.
I’m even worse about computer files, which take up lots of disk space but no physical space and so are easier to cling to. But what makes this short exercise noteworthy are that it was only ever an exercise, with no hope of becoming something more; and that I converted it from the handwritten classroom draft to a typed computer file back in the days when I was still writing on a black-and-yellow monochrome monitor and storing files on 5-inch floppies. It’s amazing this file still exists, uncorrupted and readable, after migrating across at least a half-dozen personal computers, from the 5-inch floppy to a 3.5-inch floppy to a ZIP drive (remember those?) to a flash drive to a portable external hard drive….
And now here it is, stored on the Internet, because it was one of the earliest creative writing exercises I did, and because for some reason, I think that — not the writing itself, but the act of attempting to write — is worth preserving.
There are a number of popular comparisons going around right now. On a recent episode of The Daily Show, John Stewart compares “fat cat teachers” to bankers and Wall Street investors and points out the gross disparity between million-dollar executive bonuses resulting from billion-dollar federal bailouts and the $50,000+ salaries of teachers in a climate of billion-dollar budget cuts in education. On a recent Wonk Room post, I’ve read comparisons between the millions of dollars in proposed cuts to federal subsidies for PBS, NPR, and (appropriate to this conversation) the NEA, and the billions of dollars in federal subsidies being extended to the oil industry. Both are worthy comparisons, but both are problematic in so many ways I don’t even want to go into them here (and I’m sure you can point them out yourselves).
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Crisis in the Dairyland – For Richer and Poorer…, posted with vodpod
The comparison I’ve always made is between doctors and doctors, by which I mean medical doctors and academic doctors. It’s not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, but it’s definitely not oranges and apples. It’s more like oranges and tangerines. It’s certainly a comparison the general public is familiar with, even if they aren’t comfortable with it: when I completed my PhD, my brother bought me a t-shirt that reads “Trust me, I’m a doctor”; whenever I wear it, people on the street smile and ask, “Oh really? What kind of doctor are you?” I explain I’m a PhD, and their smiles collapse.
“Oh,” they say.
They don’t even bother to add out loud what they’re saying in their head: “Never mind, then.” They simply change the subject or end the conversation.
This is a disparity of respect, but it’s based, I think, in a disparity of salary, as though how much we make determines our worth. I won’t go into the philosophical or quasi-religious arguments for this (research social or socio-economic evolution, or prosperity theology, if you’re interested), but it does seem to be a dominant ideology in America. If you want a syllogism to express it, it would go something like this: “If people are paid according to what they’re worth (or the value of what they provide), then people who receive high salaries must be worth more (or provide greater value) than people who receive lower salaries.” According to this perspective, then, a medical doctor is worth more, or provides a greater service, than a teacher.
(I should point out that I’m primarily talking about college and university professors, because that’s my field of direct experience and because that’s where you’re most likely to find teaching academic PhDs. But plenty of PhDs work in education in other ways, via research or writing or other cultural venues; and plenty of teachers in our K-12 schools, both public and private, have higher ed degrees, including PhDs. So while most of the examples that will follow are from colleges and universities, I’ll use the term “teacher” to apply to anyone who provides educational services to society as a whole.)
On the surface, this disparity of “merit” might seem pretty valid. After all, medical doctors save lives, or at least (in the case of most doctors) prevent the early demise of lives. They help people achieve healthier lives and, therefore, presumably happier lives, and they also help prolong those lives. That’s a heck of a service to society.
Of course, teachers help people achieve more enlightened, more aware lives and, therefore, presumably happier lives. They also help improve people’s ability to continue improving themselves, which, in our sadly money-minded society, often translates to greater earning potential, higher salaries, and so on. I don’t like thinking of education in terms of its financial payoff, but in fact the higher level of education a person has attained, the greater that person’s salary is likely to be. According to the US Census Bureau, the mean income for a person with a high school diploma or equivalency is $31,280; some college, even without graduating, bumps that number up to $32,500. Finish a bachelors, and you leap to $58,600. (Keep these next numbers in mind for later.) A masters brings you to $70,800 and a PhD to nearly $100,000. So, clearly, educating people does improve their lives, at least financially, and in this way, academic doctors benefit and, from a certain perspective, prolong the life of society as a whole. And in many, many cases, the education we help people attain does, both directly and indirectly, wind up saving lives.
So surely, teaching doctors provide a service comparable to medical doctors. Why then this disparity?
The reason this is even a conversation right now, of course, is because of the recent spotlight on teachers as a whole and some of the misguided (I’m tempted to use the words “delusional,” “idiotic,” or even “lunatic”) assumptions about how “overpaid” teachers are. And I’m writing this today because most of what I’ve seen are anecdotal arguments: “I know a teacher who milked the system and ripped off taxpayers for a small fortune!” Or, “I am a teacher, and I drive a shit car and am in danger of losing my house because I’m paid so little!” And I started wondering, what are the real numbers? When people complain teachers are “overpaid” or “underpaid,” on what standard are they basing this?
Those seeking to cut teacher salaries and benefits talk about how teachers make $50,000, $70,000, even $90,000, while the “average” American worker is doing good to pull in $30,000. Meanwhile, the teachers and their supporters argue that people with far fewer qualifications — less education, for example — make far more money. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin who is seeking to kill the collective bargaining rights of all state employees, including teachers, and to cut their salaries, make them pay more for their benefits, and so on, is a college drop-out, yet he makes $137,092, plus benefits. (That’s just his government salary; I don’t know what he made in the private sector.)
But we really ought to be comparing people with similar credentials — similar levels of expertise, similar levels of education — and since the level of education required for the PhD has so few corollaries in the private-sector world, the easiest comparison seems to be between PhDs and MDs.
So I did some digging, and here’s what I found:
After the initial bachelors degree (often a specialized, science-heavy pre-med degree) medical doctors typically spend about four years in medical school, followed by a one-year internship and two to three years as a medical resident. That’s a total of seven to eight years of postgraduate education.
Medical school typically costs between $180,000 and $200,000. During this time, most medical students offset the costs of school with teaching or medical assistant positions, the average pay for which is around $28,000. Understandably, most medical students wind up taking out huge student loans. Still, the internship and residency that follow med school are paid positions and, as far as I can find, are essentially “on the job training,” meaning they are still a vital part of a doctor’s education but they are also (poorly) paid positions and require no tuition (though I suspect there remain some at least nominal education costs, like books, supplies, and conferences, comparable to the cost of continuing education for any post-grad employee). Most internships pay an average of $35,000, and most residencies pay between $36,000 and $41,000 a year. Enough to live on, but only just, and they do nothing to help pay off those hefty student loans. So, depending on how frugally student doctors live, they can complete their degree and become board-certified with as much as $20,000 in debt, or as much as $20,000 in the bank. That’s a dicey financial position to be in, so to help these new doctors get back on their feet, they command high salaries.
Finding a medical field equivalent to a PhD is difficult. Some fields, like the astronomically well-paid specialized surgeons, are so minutely area-specific that it’s almost impossible to find an academic equivalent, or, when I can, those fields are so far out on the fringes that comparing them isn’t really relvant. Other fields, like the general “Family Practioner,” seem to require slightly less medical school (three years rather than four); in the academic world, it might be the equivalent of someone teaching with a masters degree or, perhaps more accurately, ABD. I could go with “General Surgeon” because that seems to require a high degree of specialization but is still “general,” making it more relatively comparable to some PhDs. But “Psychiatrist” or “Internal Medicine” seems closer to what we academics do (though the latter, like “Family Practitioner,” requires one year less of schooling), so those might be a fairer comparison. In the end, I’m going to use an average of those latter three.
I also found an array of sources for salaries, but all are in the ballpark of each other, and since I’ll use the Bureau of Labor Statistics for PhDs later, I’ll give you the BLS numbers here as well: The average pay for doctors (internists, psychiatrists, and general surgeons) is $189,140.
And I say they deserve it.
But now let’s look at PhDs.
For the sake of making comparisons I’m familiar with, I’m going to go with degrees in the Humanities, particularly English, because that’s what I do. I should point out a few discrepancies, though. On the one hand, PhDs in the Humanities make some of the lowest salaries of any academic teacher at the college or university level, so comparing them to doctors is going to look a bit skewed. For a better representation, I have added in (much) higher paying fields like engineering. On the other hand, degrees in humanities typically take up to two years longer to complete than degrees in engineering (don’t ask me why — I have no explanation for this), which, in terms of time spent on education and therefore, presumably, overall qualifications, makes Humanities PhDs more comparable to MDs.
For the sake of comparison, though, the faculty salary numbers from the BLS do include all areas of study, not just Humanities. (English professors, if you’re curious, make between $15,000 and $40,000 a year LESS than engineering professors. So bear that in mind when you see the AVERAGE PhD salaries below.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To fairly compare these fields, we should look at how PhDs get started, so let’s look at their education.
Like MDs, PhDs require a lot of expensive postgraduate study. Don’t think med school gets the monopoly on “grueling effort.” On average, most PhDs will take between six and eight years, though it can get done more quickly if you run through a single degree (effectively wrapping the masters degree into the PhD). Still, a masters degree typically takes between two and three years to finish, followed by another three to five years (minimum) for the PhD. (Some in the Humanities spend as long as seven years just on the PhD, because the nature of their research is tedious and their resources far-flung. I spent four and a half years on mine, for a total of six and a half years of postgraduate education, which is the average.)
After this, in order to best compete on the market, many PhDs will engage in a year (or sometimes several years) of postdoctoral study, which is probably the best equivalent of, say, the medical residency. But it’s not a requirement, and most do just fine without it, so let’s skip that scenario.
During this average six and a half years of study, PhD students will spend, on average, between $160,000 and $200,000 on their education. To compensate, they take on positions as teaching assistants, program assistants, or research assistants, earning between $32,000 and $40,000 a year. (These numbers, like those for the tuition here and in the medical field, are based on the University of Wisconsin-Madison, more on which in the footnote below. I bring it up here, though, because I made nowhere near these figures while working as a teaching assistant and later a teaching fellow in Texas — and I won awards for my work there. Texas notwithstanding, though, Wisconsin’s pay for their grad students is more or less average compared with the rest of the country.)
So, PhD students make roughly the same as medical students, and their tuition is comparable though slightly cheaper (a frugal grad student in Wisconsin might be able to clear school with no debt, but a med student might not be so lucky).
But now that they’ve finished their degree (roughly equal to an MD), it’s time to start earning, and here’s where the disparity kicks in.
According to the BLS’s 2008-2009 numbers, the average salary for full-time faculty was $79,439. But this included the lower tiers of full-time teachers, “instructor” and “lecturer.” These rankings are difficult to line up with medical practitioners. For some, the ranks of “instructor” or “lecturer” are the equivalent of a medical students’ residency years, essentially on-the-job training. (This isn’t at all fair to the many hard-working teachers with a masters degree, but it’s an easy comparison for argument’s sake.) On the other hand, those committed to teaching at the instructor or lecturer level, with a masters or a PhD, are something like the medical equivalent of a family doctor or internal medicine expert (for lack of better comparisons), and so we should probably more accurately compare their salaries to these levels of doctors. But since we’re talking about doctors — whether an MD or a PhD — I’ll confine this to those positions most likely (though not always) requiring a doctorate to teach: the top three levels of professorship.
By rank, then, the average salary for these top three tiers are $108,749 for professors, $76,147 for associate professors, and $63,827 for assistant professors. (Anyone interested in crunching extra numbers might like to know that instructors make $45,977, and lecturers make $52,436. You might also like to know that in Wisconsin, I never made anything close to those numbers.)
I should also pause to point out that the BLS comments on how high-paying non-academic fields impact the payscale in the academic market: “In fields with high-paying nonacademic alternatives — medicine, law, engineering, and business, among others — earnings exceed these averages. In others fields, such as the humanities and education, earnings are lower.”
I can tell you as a guy who teaches in the Humanities, the earnings are MUCH lower.
All in all, teachers with PhDs make something in the neighborhood of $83,000 (though this is the national average across all fields — my friends teaching English in Wisconsin make a little more than half that), which means that doctors, with almost identical levels of education, expertise, and professional credentials to teachers, make on average more than twice what a PhD makes.
Enter the “we work harder” arguments.
This is similar to the “dollar for worth” argument I mentioned at the beginning. Its syllogism (which is more easily quantifiable and therefore, on the surface if it, easier to argue), reads: “If people are paid according to how often (or how hard) they work, then people who receive high salaries must be working more often (or harder) than people who receive lower salaries.”
A lot of people, when backed into this corner, start complaining that teachers are spoiled not because they make so much money (which, clearly, they don’t), but because they don’t have to work as hard. They get Thanksgiving and Christmas and Spring Break off. They get summers off. They quit work early. One guest on Fox News recently said his own mother was a teacher and she was finished by 2:30 in the afternoon, was home by 3.
I don’t know his mother or what kind of teacher she was, but this statement strikes me as ridiculous. My mother, too, was a teacher, and I was a latchkey kid starting in fourth grade because even though my school finished at 3 in the afternoon, my mother couldn’t get home till after 5, on a good day. Most weekends, she was up at the school preparing the classroom or grading papers — even though they often turned off air on weekends to save money, and we lived in Texas. When we kids had off for holidays, as often as not my mother was in teacher in-service, attending meetings or working on professional development. As much as half her summer break went to wrapping up the end of one academic year or gearing up for the next. And this is K-12. PhDs work at least as hard.
In a speech from 1992, one University of Virginia professor described the time he spent meeting with students, preparing lessons, grading assignments, attending committee meetings, advising organizations, conducting community outreach, engaging in research, writing scholarly papers to advance the field of research and thereby better teach the students, to say nothing of the time he actually spent in the classroom. He tallied his working week at 50 to 55 hours. And I got the sense from his speech that he was tenured. More recently, in an open letter to Governor Walker in Wisconsin, a Wisconsin university professor calculated his work week at 60 hours. When I taught in Wisconsin (I was an LTE teaching five English classes each semester), I figured out I was putting in an average of 60 to 70 hours a week.
Which makes me wonder, how many hours a week do doctors work?
A lot, you would imagine. They’re doctors, after all. They’re responsible for the health of their patients and are, in theory, “on call” all the time even if they aren’t specialists or ER surgeons.
According to a 2003 survey in the Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors work an average of 54 hours a week. The lowest number (dermatologists) was 45.5 hours; the highest (anesthesiologists and OBGYNs) was 61. That’s well within the range of what PhDs work. Even when I looked only at those three fields I was using for the salary averages (internists, psychiatrists, and general surgeons), the average work week was 55 hours. The average work week for PhDs comes out to around 60 hours, which means we do work harder, but not by much.
Plus, we have all that vacation to look forward to.
So I ran the numbers a different way. Assuming doctors work 50 weeks a year — taking only two weeks for vacation (and if I were a medical doctor, I’d feel crazy for taking that little in down time!) — doctors work, on average, about 2,750 hours in a year. If we were paying doctors an hourly wage, they’d make about $68 an hour.
PhDs, by comparison, work roughly 40 weeks a year (16 weeks each semester, a couple of weeks on each end for prep and wrap-up, a couple of weeks in the middle for between-semester committee work, occasional summer teaching, etc). That gives them around 2,400 working hours in a year, give or take a couple of weeks, which is a good 350 hours less than doctors.
But if we were paying teachers by the hour, they’d only make $34. Exactly half what medical doctors make.
A comparable amount of time spent in school and training, a comparable financial investment in their education and their careers, and equivalent levels of work (longer weeks for teachers, but fewer of them).
But teachers are only worth half as much?
The next time you visit your doctor and he asks to stick a needle in your arm, or she wants to cut you open for surgery, ask yourself, What would happen to my doctor — and what would happen to me — if I paid this person only half as much?
And the next time you send your kid to school, or you enroll in a college course, or you hear on the news how American education is falling behind other parts of the world, ask yourself, What would our future look like if I paid teachers twice as much as they make now?
UPDATE: This post is getting a lot of traffic, so I thought I’d add here that I’ve since written a coda with some more information, which you can find here.
It’s worth noting that I’m using a lot of statistics from UW-Madison (including their med school stats), because it makes for a convenient benchmark: as Wisconsin and now the nation debates state employee pay, teacher salaries, and collective bargaining rights, keep in mind that Wisconsin is NOT typical. On the one hand, UW-Madison’s compensation for graduate students, in teaching or research assistantships, is somewhat higher than the national average (and SIGNIFICANTLY higher than any compensation I ever got in Texas). This is mostly due to the collective bargaining rights of the state’s Teaching Assistants Association — the same group, I should point out, that began the march to the Wisconsin state capitol building and has maintained the momentum on the protest movement throughout its duration. On the other hand, teachers in Wisconsin have already sacrificed significant salary and benefits concessions, to the extent that while Wisconsin has a strong reputation as one of the best educational systems in the country, it also does not turn up on any of the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables for highest-paid professors at any level. In fact, most national data charts place Wisconsin at 28th in the nation in overall teacher pay; it ranks lower, as I understand it, for college and university faculty. My point is this: Don’t assume Wisconsin’s numbers are average, and don’t assume they’re either higher or lower than the average. They are both higher and lower, depending on the level of education you’re considering (higher up front, lower in the long run); but they are representative, I think.
Also worth noting: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry employing the most English profs is “Colleges, Universities, and Professional schools” (with an employment rate of 37,530), with an average pay of $65,570.
BUT: The highest paying employer is “Educational Support Services,” with an employment rate of only 110 but paying $67,650. Of the five industries listed, “Colleges, Universities, and Professional schools” ranked 4th. Even junior colleges — which require less education and credentials of their faculty — pay an average of $1,100 more than Colleges and Universities.
Watching the street cleaner scoop up paper cups and faded wrappers, one smooth sweep of his long-handled dust pan, I remember when I cleaned houses and gas stations and grocery stores for a living. And I realize I can no longer do those things. I have lost the skills. I have developed new skills to replace them: teaching, wordsmithing, critical reading, scholarly insight. But the zen of the mop bucket, the dance of broom over dust and tile, the gymnastics of heaving trash into Dumpsters — these skills are mine no more. How I admire the man out there in my street who so blithely swings the dust pan like a clock pendulum, the gentle lift of the refuse into the rolling bin, the arc of his arm and the poetry of his stride.
People who know me or pay attention to my Facebook page or my website are probably familiar with one of my favorite quotes: “Pay attention not only to the cultivation of knowledge but to the cultivation of qualities of the heart, so that at the end of education, not only will you be knowledgeable, but also you will be a warm-hearted and compassionate person.” It’s from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, in his book Live in a Better Way, but it’s a sentiment that HH returns to again and again.
Today, for example, he posted a similar statement on his Facebook page: “Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings. Among the major troublemakers society has known, many were well-educated and had great knowledge, but they lacked a moral education in qualities such as compassion, wisdom and clarity of vision.”
Just a few moments ago I posted a link, with commentary, to a Worst Professor Ever blog post called “Why Experts Are Not the Best Teachers,” and in my comments, I complained about the author’s assertion that “knowing something at the PhD level benefits very few of your fellow citizens.” I didn’t expound on that complaint at the time, but my main issue with the original statement was that while individually no single expert’s particular, minutely finite expertise will necessarily benefit loads of people, the whole premise of academia and academic expertise is that, collectively, all our various areas of expertise in dialogue and cooperation does necessarily benefit human society as a whole. My expertise might benefit only a few, but our collective expertise benefits everyone!
Or so I wanted to shout.
But then, only moments later, I find this comment from HH the Dalai Lama, who seems the say exactly the same thing as the Worst Professor Ever — he just uses clearer terms and sets in place an opposite: Knowledge is useful to human beings, HH says, but it is not by itself sufficient and, by itself, it can be equally dangerous. What is useful, in all cases, is compassion combined with wisdom.
After I read the Worst Professor Ever post, and several others, I visited the About page there and left a comment about how the approach to academia espoused on that blog seemed antithetical to my own approach, yet I was fascinated by the possibilities and ideas the blog there raised. In my comment on the recent blog post I linked to here, I wrote that WPE’s attitude that students make the best teachers taps into my own philosophy of teaching.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has just validated WPE’s perspective by reminding me of the other part of my teaching philosophy, and now I feel complete.
So, thanks to both — the Worst Professor Ever and the man I consider the Best Teacher Ever. I’ve had education on the brain a LOT the past few weeks, thanks to the protests in Wisconsin and the attention (and attacks) those protests have brought to teachers lately. These two posts today have helped me step back from that fight a couple of steps and allowed me to remember the broader view of education… which, of course, only reinforces the importance of that fight in Wisconsin and around the country, and the need for everyone, especially American legislators, to act with compassion and wisdom.
Samuel Snoek-Brown