The education system in the US has many flaws. These flaws play into teachers’ performance, which affects students’ ability to learn. All my life I have wanted to be a teacher. I have a lot of support from my parents, but my grandparents always tried to steer me away from teaching. They’d tell me things like “I hope you like to work, because you’re gonna need two jobs just to survive” or “why don’t you go where the money is”, which was very discouraging to me, but money isn’t why I wanted to be a teacher. I want to help children learn, because I believe that children are the most important members of society, and their education is one of the most important things for society to prosper. But I always contradict myself, because I want a family of my own, and teachers do not get paid enough. The current system bases teachers’ pay from seniority, meaning a teacher who has been teaching for a lot of years will make much more than a teacher who just started. This makes sense and I’m not saying starting teachers should make insane amounts of money, but just because you’ve done something for a while, doesn’t mean you are great at it. Teachers should be paid based on evaluation.
The better you teach, the more you get paid. There are some districts that do follow this system, but this system should be implemented nationwide. This change will encourage teachers to teach in the best way possible, which allows kids to learn the most. The more teachers teach, the more kids learn, the more teachers get paid. This system will benefit everyone.
This poem highlights who’s in the wrong, who it affects, and offers a change. The who in the wrong is the legislature and current system we have today. The who being affected is the teachers, the children, and the schools. And the change is the change in system. I arranged this poem so that the title catches your attention. It makes you question who is the “I”, who is the “you”, how much does the “I” make, how much does the “you” make. This is a lyric from a song named “R.I.C.O” by Meek Mill and Drake. Meek mill is talking to his teachers in this lyric, who had previously shown doubt on Meek’s potential. He says that he now can spend a teacher’s salary in a single day of shopping, the average teacher’s salary being 45 thousand dollars. That is an insane amount of money to spend in a day, but it doesn’t seem to be that great of an amount for a yearly salary. This upset me because teaching is one of the most important professions, but teachers are paid a salary that someone could spend in a day. In my poem, each word/phrase on the left starts an idea. Each new idea relates to the whole. I decided to cut out words that don’t hold that much meaning, and I believe the words I left in hold the most power. The ending of my poem highlights the system we have today, what it is, who it affects, and the outcome, and it highlights a change that is needed, which benefits not only the teachers, but the children too, who are the ones affected the most.
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Hi Evan! I really enjoyed your insight on the lyrics and what you got from it. As a future educator I cant tell you how offensive it is to hear people say “you must really love it because you’re going to make no money”. Teachers are very undervalued and underpaid in our society. We are dealing with more issues now more than ever and no one is helping us, which is why so many of us are burning out before we even start. The only thing I disagree with is teachers shouldn’t be paid based on evaluation. When you get evaluated as a teacher you are evaluated by administration. Administration is never in the classroom and do not know your students the way you do. In that case you would be getting paid based off of someone’s opinion on your teaching methods. Otherwise, I really enjoyed this post.