Okay, so I’m biased right off the bat. Let’s get that out of the way.

Everyone knows we need to increase teacher pay. Everyone knows it, yet no one seems to be doing anything about it. There are Teacher Evaluation Programs being designed and approved in states like New York, as well as talks of Tenure Reform, but no one is really talking about increasing teacher pay. They make claims that better teachers will be paid more, which I am all for by the way, but there doesn’t seem to be a genuine push to really get behind teacher pay. It is more like lip service and less like a French kiss.

I’ll digress a bit more to say I find it bemusing (and amusing) that legislators seem so intent on evaluating teachers without implementing any means of attracting the kind of people who will do well on these evaluations. Every year, we have 4 to 5 new positions in my English department alone. Every year, we get a pool of applicants for these positions filled with rejects, losers, people who are a bit smelly, and first year teachers—so we routinely hire the first year teachers, even though we know more than half of them will be gone in a year or two. (At my school, it is more like 90 percent of them.) So no matter how good we get at evaluations, it isn’t going to matter because no one wants to do this job. There aren’t a lot of qualified applicants who want to be at a school where if a student punches you they aren’t expelled, and might be back in your class in a day or two. This year we’ve had four teachers assaulted with 0 expulsions. If you wanted to evaluate our fear, our scores would be very high.

So even though no one wants to work here, nor is anyone really going to raise teacher pay any time soon, I’m going to go even further out into my liberal, optimistic la-la-land and postulate the following: Should English teachers get paid more?

The reason I bring this up is not from my own sense of jealousy or rage, but simply by the fact that most other teachers seem to agree it would be the right thing to do.

I always say as an English teacher I should be giving out a page of writing per day per student at the very least. If I have 130 students, that means I need to read 130 pages of bad writing per day as well as edit them and give feedback. You see my point? Try doing this for a week—it would probably be the only reason you would need to agree with me.

English teachers leave this profession in droves because of the grading load. They leave for other reasons as well, but studies are conclusive that grading is the primary reason. It isn’t that high for other subjects.

Community colleges and some universities have already implemented this, giving professors less units to teach for the same pay scale. They have already recognized the need for instructors of reading and writing to take enough time to analyze and respond to student writing. The idea is not new, but old.

This isn’t to say other teachers don’t work hard. Quite the contrary, each subject has their own Achilles heel. PE teachers have 50 kids in each class. Math teachers who are checking for process need to spend almost as much time as we do on papers at times. History teachers give essays almost identical to the kind of essays we give. Teachers work hard no matter the subject. They are overworked and underpaid, and that is why no one in this country wants to be a teacher. Anyone doing this job in any capacity deserves more money to begin with.

But history teachers aren’t checking for grammar, math teachers have quite a bit of assignments an intelligent teacher’s assistant can help them grade. And at the end of the day, PE teachers go home with nothing to grade at all.

Also, the other teachers don’t seem to mind: at least, the ones I talk to. They see all the English teachers walking to their cars with stacks 2 feet high (I’m not joking, the other day my colleague had a stack of papers taller than two rulers end to end). They ask us how we do it and we reply, “We have a lot of turnover in our department.” Others just start weeping.

At a recent professional development conference, a well respected teacher leader told the group we should be assigning three times as much writing as we can grade. This implicitly means we won’t even look at two-thirds of the assignments we give out. I’m not saying we all do this, but I will admit we all have our strategies for coping with the grading load. You have to cope if you want to last—for some that means stamps, checks, or simply the recycle bin. It all comes down to the idea that we simply do not have enough hours in the day to do all the grading properly. Period.

So it probably won’t ever happen, and I really don’t know why I’m bringing it up other than the fact I like to talk about topics no one else is covering. This is a concrete example of one way we could improve the profession and the reading and writing of our students. Scores would go up. Everyone would be happier. But it won’t happen because I’m just a teacher saying it.

But evaluations are coming—everyone is talking about that. So here’s a piece of advice, the way class sizes are, and the compensation teachers receive, I hope part of any evaluative system includes future prospects for who will replace the teacher being evaluated. They need to evaluate if anyone wants to actually take their place.

And for English teachers, they’re going to have to make sure everyone isn’t grading most of our students’ work. It’s the only way we would pass.