CNN Live

I was just watching CNN Live and heard some disturbing things. Apparently teachers are selfish, greedy people who don't care about children at all, according to Steve Harper reporting from Hartford, Connecticut. Steve was reporting on the state of the economy and the need for some change in education. It is either cut 100,000 jobs nation wide or require all teachers to not receive raises in years when the economy is down.

He explained that education is paid for through property taxes. So when the economy is down the money available goes down. That makes sense to me. Less property taxes less money to pay teachers. However, the money received does not correlate to the size of classes and the amount of work teachers to do. So if the economy is in a two to three year slump classes can still increase in size each year, as well as class workloads.

Shouldn't the education of our nation's children be one of our highest priorities? Freezing raises in salary until the economy gets better is a good idea and most teachers would be willing to do it but teachers are worried that that day when the economy is good enough to start giving raises will never come.

Starting teacher salary in Utah is less than $28,000 a year. People don't get into teaching for the money. Then for Steve to assume they are only teaching for the money is ridiculous. My wife love's teaching. She loves when she can help student s understand new concepts. She loves teaching, she hates grading and everything else that goes with it.

One school District forced teachers to show up one minute before school and required them to leave no later than 10 minutes after school got out so they could pay them less. That is ridiculous. Those teachers are still going to work as many as 60+ hours a week because they love teaching. Now they are getting paid less for their work.

Another example, one school fired or laid off all of its employees and then rehired them all at lower salaries. If that were to happen in an actual company would that be legal? Seriously, I'm interested to know.

I tried to post a comment on the CNN website. I could not find an appropriate place to post my comments. it makes me mad that they can say such things and not allow for people to post their comments. So now I'm forced to hear people say my wife is greedy, selfish and doesn't care about the students.

I see how attitudes are changing toward education both from the students perspective and the rest of the country and it worries me. it seems to be less and less about the quality of the education and the learning that comes from it and more about the grade and how cheap they can make it.

They were giving out grants(extra money) to math and science teachers here in Utah because they were short on them. Less and less people are going into those fields here because of how ridiculous things here are getting.

Sorry about my rant. This is actually better than it would be if Courtney were to speak her mind. She was pretty upset listening to it this morning.