How Much?

A lot of us got into the teaching biz because we wanted to affect change. There aren't many of us who got into it for the big paycheck. Maybe that's just the six figure checks that some teachers are banking in New Jersey, but it could also be a little bit of hyperbole on the part of that state's governor. People who want to make big money, at least in New Jersey become talk show hosts or singers. For the record, Governor Christie is making a six figure salary, and his family is pulling in a reported half-million. Nice work, if you can get it.
On this side of the contiguous United States, the salary is still somewhat negotiable. Not by me, but by my union. I tend not to wrap myself up in that process because I have been told by the guy signing people up for a newspaper subscriptions for free T-shirts that teachers don't make enough. I get it. I am doing this job because I want to make a difference.
For the better, in case there was some question.
In my first year, it was a romantic idea: riding into an urban school to bring my own particular and peculiar vision of how things could be to a generation of youth hungry for whatever it was that I had to offer. That creative writing degree, for example. My esoteric sense of humor. My tireless energy. My ability to wait for hours before I go to the bathroom. These were my calling cards. Those, and the fact that I felt I was "good with kids." When I said this to the recruiter for the district intern program, he laughed. At me.
That was nineteen years ago. I've been going back to school. Day after day. Year after year. Trying to affect change. Here's what I have figured out: I am not making the kind of change that I had imagined way back in the previous century. I continue to be surprised by the lack of change I seem to be able to affect on the children with whom I am supposed to be so good. Then I realize that I never went to school without learning something, even if it was that I didn't want to go to school anymore. What I learned was that the change is in me. I am not the fresh-faced idealist I was back in 1997. I am a veteran, but I have seen a generation of children pass through the doors of this school. So much so that I am now teaching a couple of children of students I had way back in those earliest days. Can you put a price tag on that?