This shit really ticks me right the fuck off:
[Time] - Hope Brown can make $60 donating plasma from her blood cells twice in one week, and a little more if she sells some of her clothes at a consignment store.
(just a bit of unreported income here? - ed.)
It’s usually just enough to cover an electric bill or a car payment
(are you driving a used Pinto / Hyundai Excel? - ed.).
This financial juggling is now a part of her everyday life‐something she never expected almost two decades ago when she earned a master’s degree in secondary education and became a high school history teacher. Brown often works from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. at her school in Versailles, Ky., then goes to a second job manning the metal detectors and wrangling rowdy guests at Lexington’s Rupp Arena. With her husband, she also runs a historical tour company for extra money.
"I truly love teaching," says the 52-year-old. "But we are not paid for the work that we do."
That has become the rallying cry of many of America’s public-school teachers, who have staged walkouts and marches on six state capitols this year. From Arizona to Oklahoma, in states blue, red and purple, teachers have risen up to demand increases in salaries, benefits and funding for public education. Their outrage has struck a chord, reviving a national debate over the role and value of teachers and the future of public education.
I first saw this on a high school friend's Facebook page (do not lecture me on that point - I have a semi-professional commitment for that; key words 'high school' for you wannabe wags / scolds) and within 20 seconds had the following questions about what a piece of shit slanted hatchet job this article was:
Not trying to pick a fight here, but for me this article raises more questions than it answers. How many teachers arrive three hours before the presumed 8:00 opening bell? Does she do this every single day ('often' is not quantified and could mean any number)? What exactly is she doing during those three hours? Why isn't her actual salary mentioned, or her husband's? Does she have a family? How many kids are they trying to support? Are they living in a house they really can't afford?
The salary omission is, to me, really the key to this entire article, and the failure to disclose it does little to sell the main point of the article, that presumably she is underpaid relative to her efforts.
I don't like articles like this which are scant on certain facts, like the ones I just mentioned. Granted, I'm a cold, heartless bastard but for me the point of this article (and I've read many of them) is to take one person's situation and then shoehorn that into an indictment of the whole system. It's rightly called a 'sob story', meant to elicit sympathy for the subjects of the story. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Care to guess the number of responses to that post / comment of mine? |