Engineers are professionals. They have to go to a special school, buy a signet ring, make lots of money, and hang out with other engineers. Doctors, dentists, and psychiatrists are professionals. Marrying their daughter to a doctor is the brass ring that many mothers (secretly, maybe most) strive for. They perform a critical service that your next door neighbour or your cousin Jerry are incapable of (unless they are doctors). Lawyers, once thought to be shysters, are professionals. They speak Latin, for gosh sakes. Doctors drive expensive cars, can use knives on your innards without killing you (most of the time), and have pretty wives and au pares. Although they have investments, most engineers, doctors and lawyers are rich because they make lots of money or own companies and properties and the reason they own those companies and properties is because they make outrageous salaries.
Teachers and nurses don't make a lot of money. They make what used to be a middle class wage but most of the teachers and nurses I know don't own a lot of expensive real estate or eat at fancy restaurants. (I did see the former librarian at my school - a woman with a high school education - driving a Hummer so maybe Librarian is a profession.) Policing as a profession is a total joke. In our security crazy society, the policeman has been elevated from thug to someone earning the equivalent of a teacher's or nurse's salary but they are still thugs - just well trained, high priced ones.
What keeps teaching from being a profession apart from a cop's salary? To begin with, anybody can teach . . . or thinks they can. The fact that teachers have been trained in differentiated curriculum, assessment, learning styles, remediation, and learning strategies is largely ignored. Every mother who has read to their child or helped him/her with their homework feels qualified to step into a classroom and hold forth. Every parent who has ever hosted a birthday party or a sleep over thinks that they have a handle on classroom management. Every aunt who has attended a Christmas concert and every uncle who has coached a midget hockey team thinks that they could do what teachers do at least as well as teachers do it. Do people think they could build an apartment building? Remove tonsils? Drill out a cavity? Keep a wrongfully accused client out of jail? Of course not.
And teachers don't ACT like professionals. They don't put degrees on their walls, they dress worse than the sales personnel at the local department store, and they eat lunch in a common room - captives in their place of employment and available for countless interruptions from clients (students) and co-workers. Teachers work through their lunch hours giving individual help to students. Does your doctor do that? Not even your nurse or police constable does that. To raise money for school programs, teachers allow themselves to be pelted with sponges, dress in ridiculous costumes, and undergo other indignities (in the same way that daddies put on crowns and have tea parties with their daughters). I was never my students' daddy or friend or target. Although I lent a sympathetic ear and did up snowsuits, I never saw myself as an ersatz parent or uncle or grandfather; they had the real thing at home. I was a mentor, an instructor, a fair mediator, and a role model. I cared about them but my job was to educate and inculcate the mores of the dominant culture.
Finally, professionals aren't treated like garment workers. They are allowed to practice their profession and, although there is an adjudicating body that can impose sanctions and fines, they are left to their own devices in an environment where their training is considered sufficient prerequisite for carrying out their duties and responsibilities. Teaching? You're kidding, right? Where the teachers' association should function in the same capacity as the College of Physicians and Surgeons for doctors, or APEGA for engineers, it is merely a bargaining agent and an agency of last resort. Teachers are afforded all the independence and respect of a factory worker with Department Heads, Vice Principals, Principals, Central Office, the Superintendent, and your uncle Bob being in a position to tell teachers how to do their jobs.
In most schools in the Edmonton Catholic System, teachers are 'asked' (commanded) to submit their student evaluations to the principal. The marks and comments the teacher assigns are subject to, not only the scrutiny but also the REVISION of those marks and comments by the administration. Teachers are told what marks they can or can not give, what comments to make and what format to use in drafting a report to parents. Does this sound like a professional atmosphere or does it reek of the Victorian workhouse or some Chinese textile factory. Where is the room for professional pride? Where is the trust that professionals, working in their area of expertise, will acquit themselves in a manner befitting a professional?
So I'm sorry my brothers and sisters in the profession but you are not worthy of calling yourselves professionals. The motto of the Alberta Teachers' Association is "Magistri Neque Servi, which means "masters not servants." Perhaps this was true when that motto was drafted but, considering that teachers are not even masters of their own profession or even their own classrooms, perhaps it's time to get another motto. Perhaps, "Just Another Poor Civil Servant" or "Wannabes" or "I Didn't Have the Strength of Character to Go Into a Real Profession".
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