Teachers endure major tests

"The [teaching] job was the hardest I've had, by far," Morman wrote, "but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I'd ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn't true. ... I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, 'Get out of my face.' So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else.

"I try to get a class to come to order while one kid is jumping on a second, a third calls out my name asking me for a pencil, a fourth demands that I let her go to the bathroom and a fifth needs to go see Miss Smith, while a sixth needs a pass to the nurse's office and a seventh starts making silly, repetitive noises. ... One day a cheap calculator hit the wall just above my head. Another day, it was a Jell-O cup, whose contents dripped down the wall and stained the picture of Harriet Tubman I had hanging on a bulletin board. ...

"I had a meltdown after seeing how poorly my kids did on a standardized test.

"I resolutely refuse to place the blame anywhere other than on myself. ... One thing I absorbed from my otherwise inadequate training is that it was up to me to make a difference. And I did make a difference, but not enough to sustain me through the nonsense. ... Nothing useful comes out of blaming the parents for the bad behavior of the kids. And certainly nothing useful comes out of blaming the kids themselves. There is the short-term problem of how to change their behavior in order to be able to conduct class. ... But in the long run, there is a fundamental problem."

The problem, he says, is one of money and priorities.

"I detest the politicians who say, 'You know how to spend your hard-earned money better than the government does.' This is junk. ... Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I agree."

In Morman's view, we simply don't spend enough on education. "I'm all for throwing more money at it," Morman says. "We should pay people $100,000 a year to teach."

Not that that would have kept him in the game. Those who can teach, he says, are special people.