Teachers, Politics & Family
You would think if anyone would appreciate the wave of red-state teacher strikes, it would be me. There were a number of reasons I choose OLL over other universities (my 3 other, younger college-educated siblings chose public universities) and one of them was they had a first-rate teaching program. My early intent was to become a math/science teacher, along with a religious vocation in a teaching order like the Jesuits, not unlike Pope Francis. The odd thing is I never ended speaking to anyone in their education department. I fell in love with philosophy, an ineligible second concentration for secondary education, and my aspiration quickly transferred to a desire to become a professor. (I would make a brief effort to resurrect my high school teaching ambitious after earning my Master's in math at UT and finding myself unemployed after getting passed over by the "sure-thing" USAF officer selection board, but I needed financial aid, and my parents blocked it. (That's another story; they had contributed nothing to my college finances, but the UT rules were if they had claimed me as a dependent on the past year's income tax statement, they had to submit a family financial statement for me to be eligible. My parents objected to the idea of my going back to college; they thought I already had too many degrees. They did have a FFS on file for my little brother, an engineering student, but UT refused to consider that, saying it would violate my brother's "privacy".)
I resurrected my dream of becoming a professor after joining the UH MBA program, initially part-time. I discovered that the business school had a PhD program, including an MIS major. I then spent the next 8 years teaching at the university level, the first 3 years as a modestly paid half-time teaching fellow (full responsibility for 2 undergraduate class sessions a semester)
I put a lot of work into courses, certainly as much if not more than my professor role models. I had to deal with a wide variability of students; I might get a computer programming major looking to score an easy A vs students who had never compiled their own computer program. I did more new textbook preps within courses (in a field where textbooks are obsolete by the time they're printed) and supplemental reading collections (Kinkos), Particularly as a professor, I went into each lecture with word-processed lecture notes. Now that doesn't mean that I needed them or read from them in class; I am one of the most articulate, extemporaneous speakers I know. Putting things into notes was a strategy I used to discipline myself into organizing and simplifying the material for students. (I'm sure a number would disagree that my classes were "easy to learn" but my classes involved abstract material and complex skills like computer programming: the courses, properly presented, are intrinsically difficult.)
My salaries as a professor were basically in the lower 40K's (and my monthly stipend as a graduate fellow was in the 500-600+/month range). Of course, 40K a year back then, thanks to the Federal Reserve, bought more, although my initial IBM-compatible desktop computer cost about $3000--at a fraction of today's memory, disk space and functionality. But I NEVER once, in any negotiation with any school, talked salary, at my or their initiative. The closest I came was when Providence College had me come for a campus visit (job interview where I normally prepare a presentation on my research) with the understanding that their position would pay at best $35K (I didn't get an offer; I think they wanted a local candidate, although in my case both sides of my family are from the nearby Fall River area; two of my paternal cousins earned undergraduate degrees from Providence College.) The only time I really got pissed off over compensation was after a good first year at UWM when my teaching ratings were decent and I had multiple journal hits--and ended up with something like a 1.5% raise vs the average faculty raise of about 2% (UWM was a strange case of senior faculty divvying up the cumulative raise). How do you justify giving me a below-average raise? That's beyond insulting; it was corrupt. Of course, junior/nontenured faculty are, in my experience, treated like crap until if and when you win tenure. [And I have never won tenure--which in principle I oppose. Of course, tenured professors would argue sour grapes, but I never went up for tenure--and I know a number of lesser-qualified professors who got tenure. One of the things that really messed with my mind is the job offer I turned down from Bowling Green State (near Toledo, OH). They made an offer before UWM; I would have accepted BGSU's offer except they wouldn't let me or guarantee my ability to teach the graduate MIS service course. (Some textbook author "owned" the course.) Working at UWM is the closest thing to living in hell, but I did get to teach grad classes. So anyway, the guy who inherited my job offer (I think he was from the University of Georgia)? He went up and got tenure in his 4th (vs. 7th) year, while my academic career was crumbling right into an economic recession. You can bet I've played the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" game more times than I care to remember over the years since then.
It's not like I went around to my other fellow MIS academics and compared notes on salary, although I heard anecdotally about subsequent UH grads getting hired at $50K or above. My position was: good for them! If I was being paid below market, another university could arbitrage the difference in a competitive market. But I had been living on a tight budget so long as a graduate student, I can remember celebrating passing my doctoral qualifying exams by going to a dollar cinema in a Houston strip mall and buying a carton of popcorn. Did it bother me that former students with a fraction of my knowledge and skills would be making more in 2 or 3 years than I did without the years of sacrifice for the PhD or the subsequent years of "publish or perish" and paying my dues? Not really. I knew down the line I had the possibility of making some consulting money on the side, although none of my mentors or colleagues with ties to the local business community ever gave me a break. Oh, I did make a few bucks here or there, say $150 reviewing a textbook (bur when you looked at the time and effort that went into it, I probably didn't make minimum wage).
There are some common prejudices about how "easy" professors have it maybe 6 to 12 lecture hours a week, maybe a few office hours. I was really putting in over 70 hours a week. Posted office hours are a joke; anytime I was on campus, I was available to students, plus I offered extra hours by appointment. I often had weird teaching schedules where, say, I had a late Tuesday morning lecture and a 3-hour lecture Tuesday night. I have personally debugged hundreds of student computer programs. I had service requirements, including being an unpaid reviewer for scholarly journals or attending university committees (e.g., MBA Admissions) or graduations, analyzing dissertation proposals or helping write and grade doctoral qualifying exams. Never mind the countless "publish or perish" hours doing and writing up research, submitting articles for journals and national conferences (I had an amazing hit ratio, but I've had my share of cheap shot rejections or papers downgraded to sparsely attended panel table discussions.) And, of course, endless hours preparing for lecture, assignments, exams, etc., preparing for future classes (reviewing textbooks, etc.) It's not like I ever once got questioned about course requirements; I didn't have to give 4 or 5 exams in a semester class or even give out computer assignments (I know MIS professors or lecturers who didn't or basically handed out assignments which were little more than typing exercises). If I wanted to water down requirements I had plenty of opportunities. When students complained about 4 computer assignments, internally I would laugh. Computer science classes often had 18 assignments and climbing; my first programming class (FORTRAN) at OLL had 1 a week and we were submitting card decks to another university with 3-day turnaround, meaning I had 2 shots to get it done; it's like doing a crossword puzzle in ink with a timer going off.
So what set this off? Among other things, the ongoing public school pension crisis almost everywhere. But among other things, I would be reading about social studies teachers in Illinois making $79K a year and being eligible for a perpetual $50K/year retirement. Let me be clear here: no history or social studies teacher would be worth $79K in an open supply-and-demand market. I'm sure historians like Tom Woods or Gingrich would disagree (at least Woods is an entrepreneur, selling subscriptions to his courses, vs. sucking at the taxpayer teat). I have an elementary school teacher niece, still paying off college loans, who would gladly take a job at half the salary, never mind his pension amount. Never mind $100K+ gym teachers/coaches.
Ironically, I have a sibling teacher niece who teaches math & robotics to eighth-grade students in Colorado, probably the closest among the 21 nephews and nieces to my initial goals. She and I are not that close, so I have no idea what she makes, but I'm sure in an open market, she would probably be making more, given the more limited supply of math teachers.
So the older sister, also teaching in Colorado but not in a public school, posted a Facebook profile wearing garb in support of Colorado union teachers, part of the red-state wave of striking teacher unions, at the expense of taxpayers. You know when I'll think that teachers are underpaid? When history teachers making $79K a year, almost invulnerable to layoff because of corrupt seniority provisions, abandon their cushy jobs and pensions to compete in the real world economy and school districts are unable to find candidates to replace him.
I'm not sure exactly why my older niece is supporting the union; maybe her younger sister is a union member, and she's showing support for her. The older one, however, was laid off from her Colorado public school during the Great Recession; in the interim she's done teaching in Texas and Kansas and is currently teaching in an alternative educational format. I'm sure she would be making more money if she could find a public school position, even at the pay being protested; I have no idea why she would be supporting the corrupt unions, which have no intent of surrendering layoff policies favoring seniority.
But if I'm too assertive, she can't cope with it. She once posted some teacher union propaganda that seeks to "educate" people that a teacher spends more than 6 hours a day teaching your kids, that they spend hours outside of class planning classes, grading papers, etc. "for free". I had no patience for such self-serving bullcrap. I've routinely worked unpaid overtime; I've worked government contracts which were capped at 40 hours a work (I mean, you had to work more than 40, but you could only bill for 40). One classic example from experience was a job for a suburban Milwaukee county in 2001. The county by contract was supposed to back up the ERP test server I was working on. They had a disk storage meltdown late on a Friday. It turns out their incompetent database backups missed a newly added datafile, and they didn't back up the software at all. I miraculously found the missing datafile from "lost & found" and managed to bring up the database (the county DBA wanted nothing to do with it in the event it failed), but literally had to spend the entire (unpaid) weekend reinstalling software. When my company tried to invoice for my time, the county shrugged their shoulders, pointed out they had a fixed-bid contract, and said, "Shit happens." My company then threw me under the bus, in the hopes they could be favorably considered for a "Phase 2" (follow-up project).
Now I've never griped to friends and family about unpaid overtime, lost holidays, evenings and weekends, waking up at 3 AM to do some computer tasks for the job. What did piss me off was when some NARA civil servant set up a meeting at 4AM to plug a spare power supply in another socket (my doing so probably would have violated some absurd union rule), and I arrived to find no electrician.
Getting back to the story, I asked her why she posted the self-serving meme. She lamely said, "People don't realize we put in extra hours." Who thinks that? I knew that for years before I graduated high school. Another relative from the other side of the family chimes in with the insight that it's what you do off the clock that wins your next promotion, etc. I then got a response from her angry husband (apparently George Bailey isn't the only one who gets attacked for criticizing a teacher), saying that she had an emotional meltdown over the exchange, crying herself to sleep.
So, no, I decided she couldn't handle a thumbs-down on her new profile picture and let it go. Now as for you parasitic red-state striking teachers: GO TO HELL! If you don't think you're getting paid your worth, join us in the private sector. I know government contractors with shitty benefits and almost no job security who have had to take 30% pay cuts to save their jobs in contract renewals.
Palin Can't Handle McCain's Second Thoughts
Now let's be clear: it wasn't McCain's vastly outspent campaign war chest. It was more than just a change election year and an incumbent President with a 30% approval rating that McCain spent the primary campaign arguing he was closest to Bush of all the candidates. McCain make some bonehead first-rate mistakes that undermined his judgment, like suspending his campaign during the TARP crisis. But probably the most disastrous decision was emphasizing his experience advantage and then nominating a 2-year governor with zero federal experience as a 70-year-old nominee's VP. An unvetted candidate who would take offense over the media's understandably curious on how someone in a low-populated, isolated state like Alaska, how she kept current on national issues--magazines or newspapers she read, etc.--so she refused to answer, arguing the question was insulting to all Alaskans. No, it wasn't, but she was in a state of denial. More importantly, it really was an unforced issue; that, of all things, was not a wise choice in spending political capital. There were other unbelievably gaffes, e.g., deliberately refusing to answer a moderator's question in a VP debate, while ignoring ludicrous attempts to frame McCain as a mad deregulator. Not to mention she basically upstaged McCain on the campaign trial and earned a cult-like following for her version of right-wing populism.
So McCain recently mourned the fact he didn't have the political backbone to form a union ticket (like Lincoln and Johnson) with his long-time friend and former Gore running mate Joe Lieberman. Everybody in 2008 know about that speculation. Let's be clear: once the economic tsunami hit, Obama didn't need to spend a billion to win the White House. The Dems were the social welfare net party, and you had off-the-charts economic uncertainty. It was bad enough McCain was running in a change year election. No, Palin: this isn't about you. You became a choice when Lieberman was not an option. Lieberman didn't go anywhere in the 2004 primary; the idea that millions would follow Lieberman to McCain was a fantasy.
