The Worst Financial Decision I Ever Made

(This post - this entire blog, actually - is dedicated to the lovely and effervescent Megyn Kelly at Fox News and everyone else who is under the gross misconception that we teachers are overpaid and underworked.)

I am 30.  I live with my boyfriend and our cat in a small (yet very cute) apartment.  I drive a 1993 Honda with a cracked windshield, windows that no longer roll down yet have to be held up with duct tape, a missing antenna and a missing hubcap.  I make my own lunch or I don't eat lunch at all during the work week, and I don't go to Starbucks anymore.  I have exactly $123 in savings, the retirement account of a 4-year-old, and I've never been able to visit my boyfriend's family in Nebraska.  On what do I blame this pretty pitiful tale?

The $6,000 in credit card debt that I racked up in my early 20s on stuff for which I have nothing to show? Pretty stupid, but manageable.  I haven't used a credit card in a couple of years, and I'll have that debt paid off in just under five years.

Spacing out while driving home one day, causing me (and three other unfortunate drivers) to pass a buss with its flashing red lights right in front of the happiest motorcycle cop in Vacaville?  Nine hundred dollars later (not counting the monthly increase in my car insurance), I still shudder and mentally seek the fetal position whenever I see a bus, but it's all paid off.

My decision to take out almost $50,000 in student loans to become a highly qualified teacher with an MA degree?  That's the one.

In 2006, having worked at various mundane-yet-comfortable office jobs throughout college and for a couple of years after, I decided to take a chance and get my credential to become a high school history teacher.  I was 25, living relatively comfortably with my then-boyfriend in an endearingly small, cute apartment.  We were by no means wealthy, or even middle class.  But, lacking a mortgage, car payments, kids, and extreme amounts of debt, we were pretty comfortable.  We ate out at nice restaurants a couple of times a month, went on vacations once in awhile.  There was Hawaii, and Disneyworld.  I flew to visit my best girlfriend in Toronto a handful of times.  There was no glitz or glamour, but financially it was enough.

If there's anyone to blame for me becoming a teacher in the first place, it's NPR.  They aired a fantastic interview with a teacher with Teach for America and I was hooked.  I don't remember why, exactly, but I just knew that I could be a pretty effing good teacher, eventually.  It sounds cheesy, but I knew it.  That was September 2005.  By July 2006 I had left my office job and was getting ready to start the one-year super intense social science credential/MA program.  Add a few months of thesis-writing to that program and boom, you have your MA degree, an investment that would pay itself off soon enough due to the annual stipend that most districts grant teachers with MA degrees (win!).  Being prohibited from working during the during the credential program, I paid for the whole shebang with student loans from the U.S. government.  That was my big mistake, and I take full responsibility for it.

Even though I was paying in-state tuition at a public university, at the end of the 18-month long program myself with a principal debt load of close to $50,000.  I was not that worried at first.  Everyone from my parents to my friends to the others in the teaching cohort to our advisers to Suze Orman thought it was not a big deal, and I agreed.  The debt was an investment.  I wasn't crazy enough to think that I would ever get rich teaching (Megyn Kelly never got the message, but then again she thinks that $50,000/year is positively rich), but this was all right before the financial collapse.  This was before the era of pink slips, lay offs, furloughs, and increased class sizes.  This was when new teacher graduates still got jobs.  I knew that so long as I stayed a teacher, I would most likely never be rich, but I thought I'd be able to live a comfortable middle-class life.  I knew it would be at least a decade before I could afford to buy a house, but that was OK.  Along with three of my close friends from the credential program, I got hired at a school with a good reputation (taking into account its location in a less-than-stellar county) and a decent starting salary).  The trade-off was a very significant commute and relatively high monthly out-of-pocket insurance costs, but it was a good deal all in all.

Fast forward to March 2009. This was the first year of mass pink slips throughout most of California.  Many of my friends received pink slips then (hell, most of them have received pink slips every year), but the four of us new social studies teachers celebrated when March 15 passed with no pink slips.  We finished out the year (our second year of teaching), and celebrated that we had achieved the holy grail of public high school teaching - tenure!  Finally we could live the comfortable high-roller life for which every other working professional lusts.  We could work the mere 6.5 hours each day for which our contract pays us, enjoy our 3 months of "vacation" and bleed the state dry by happily over-dosing on our cushy health care benefits (how many pap smears can I try to get this month?! oh joy!). I frequently had sultry dreams in which I was the movie version of King Denethor, greedily consuming delicious roast chicken and grapes and wine in front of various private-sector peons.

But shortly after my first year teaching, I learned first-hand how ridiculous the "Last In First Out" lay-off policy that plagues many unionized teachers actually is.  Our school laid off two social science teachers, and because four of us had the same hire date and credentials, they drew two names out of a hat.  Mine was one of those names, and in June of 2010 I learned that I would not have a job to go back to in August.  Luckily, I managed to find a teaching job elsewhere.  But, through a very odd turn of events, I found myself back at the original high school in the middle of October 2010.  One of the teachers left the school for a job as an administrator in September, so I took his position.

I came back to a school that had changed significantly.  Class sizes, which had previously been "soft capped" at 30 and "hard capped" at 32 (meaning we got paid a certain amount each day that we had 31 or 32 students enrolled in a period, due to the extra work associated with those students), were now capped at 39.  Any pay for extra students was gone.  We took an additional 2% pay cut, which manifested themselves as three furlough days.  Where there had been limited money for technology, new textbooks, or basic supplies, now there was little to none.  Teachers routinely purchased their own paper, ink, markers, and anything else that might be needed.  Technology was (and is) a mostly joke - my computer had a floppy disk drive, and I'm talking the 5-inch floppy disk drive (it was recently upgraded to one with a broken CD-Rom drive and USB ports that don't recognize flash drives).  And while this situation is the shits, compared to other districts throughout California and the nation, ours still has it pretty good.

Now it is 2011, and while the fiscal situation of schools and teachers throughout the nation has worsened, I find myself battling waves of mental rage when I hear someone complain that teachers are greedy, lazy, overpaid babysitters.  Due to the pay cuts and increased out-of-pocket healthcare costs, I barely bring home the same amount that I brought home as a first-year teacher.  Because our district has not purchased new U.S. history textbooks since 1998, I spend literally hundreds of dollars every couple of months in paper and ink so that I can create and print out my own background information resources and primary sources. I buy my own scantrons.  I bring papers to grade to Superbowl parties.  The days when I work only 8 hours are few and far between, and I don't remember the last time that I didn't work at least a little bit during a weekend or a vacation.

This blog isn't meant to garner any pity (although mom, if you're reading, I could use a little cioppino and a bag of kitty litter), and I blame no one but myself for making the decision to become a teacher in the first place.  If I could go back and do it again, I would wait a few years and save up the $35,000 that it cost to get the credential and say to hell with the MA.  But I can't, and I still don't think it makes sense that in a nation like America we can't afford to treat and pay our school teachers like the professionals that we (usually) are.  The only reasons I can rationalize for this are a) the "system" that runs our nation is fundamentally broken and we're all ultimately screwed, or b) enough people don't fully understand how hard teachers work, how much we actually accomplish, how highly most of us actually do perform, and how little we are paid.  Hence, this silly little blog.