This is in response to Richard Sabine’s guest column (Feb. 15).
I teach mathematics at Lewiston High School and I invite Sabine to come shadow me. I find his letter ignorant at best, offensive at worst, and I hope that experiencing time in my shoes would help him to understand what a teacher really does.
The various claims he makes in his column are absurd.
My contract day starts at 7:30 a.m., but when I get to school between 7:00 and 7:10 every morning, I am hardly the first person there. I am regularly among the first to leave, after 3 p.m., but often well past 4 p.m.. My contract day ends at 2:30 p.m.
When I do leave, I pick up my own children, who have had to extend their own school day (at our family’s expense) to accommodate the fact that their mother is a teacher. We get home, sit at the kitchen table, and I help them with their homework while I grade papers, plan lessons and do research that continues well past everyone’s bedtimes.
No, LHS teachers do not need permission to leave during our prep time. We are people with lives, fortunate to work in a district that allows us professional courtesy. But where do we go? To the grocery store to buy food for hungry kids; to Staples to buy supplies not provided by our budget; and, yes, sometimes, we pick up lunch and our dry cleaning.
I am curious where Sabine gets his information that 50 percent of the students in our lunch line being illiterate. That is a fallacy, plain and simple. It is irresponsible to make that claim and arrogant to think that the Lewiston population is so ignorant as to believe it.
Likewise, to claim that our students “fail” the SAT demonstrates a lack of understanding about what the SAT measures.
Sabine claimed the School Committee works to financially benefit teachers. In fact, I could move to virtually any district in Maine and receive a significant raise. It would be nice to be on par with some Southern Maine districts. I assure you, teachers don’t work in Lewiston because they are getting rich.
He did make one good point: what we could do if we had one-on-one time with struggling students. Alas, the school budget does not permit that. Teachers work with outdated textbooks and limited supplies, purely because we love teaching and our students. If there were money to adequately fund this support, I can’t think of anyone who would decline it.
I am curious how Sabine thinks I or my colleagues might do a better job.
Jennifer Michaelis, Auburn
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