Hello, Welcome. I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. Musing Interruptus is a podcast for sharing thoughts and stories and enjoying idiomatic phrases. You can read along; the transcription is in the description of this episode; click on continue reading to open a Google Doc with the complete transcription. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, share it, but more importantly, continue the conversation. The background music is called Small World Reveals by Blue Dot.
Cape buffalos, saltwater crocodiles, sun bears, wild boars, cassowaries, wasps, mooses or meese, Tasmanian devils, western diamondback rattlesnakes, and me are the most aggressive and territorial animals in the world, especially when it comes to education, according to Wildlife Informer (2024). Today, It’s Not Magic; It’s Synapse.
Ah, the working man and the working woman and all the collars they wear. Educators are said to be in between collars. There are white collars, blue collars, and some people have written about pink collars. If you ask Marx, these distinctions are bullshit; unless you control the means of production, you are the proletariat.
That said, distinctions are made with subclasses and colors. White-collar workers have administrative jobs, work behind desks, and have attained higher education; they also make more money.
Blue-collar workers, the working class, range from low to high skilled; they work for wages, sometimes low, depending on the job and skill level. However, some blue-collar workers are highly skilled (meaning they educated themselves or trained to attain knowledge), and they get paid more per hour.
Where do public school teachers fit? Highly educated, low-paid workers. Many of the hours I work are not accounted for or paid. When I got paid for activities outside of the classroom, it took up to seven months to see those wages, and by that time, they had already depreciated. I don’t think ordinary blue-collar workers go so many months without being paid. Nobody bats an eye. You have to either be wealthy and teach as a hobby or hold down several jobs. I am the latter. I do translations, private English classes, ghostwriting, and copywriting, and now I am endeavoring in voice-over work. Wish me luck and pass my name around, please.
The question stands: why do educators stick around the world of public education? Off the bat, vocation. The power of vocation is a double-edged sword; it will be used against you. Sometimes by the very students or institutions that hire you. Many of the teachers that stick around are convinced that their work will positively impact their student’s development and that of their country. An exercise in public service on the taxpayer’s dime. They would be amazed at how far that dime stretches. That dime stretches so thin that, many a time, it is invisible. All you know is that it was once there. I would say it borders on exploitation, but that’s commie talk. Should you decide to live solely on your teaching wages, you might be accused of having made a vow of poverty. In reality, it is exploitative. I wonder if that is ever going to change. Nobody seems to care.
The world is changing; the pace is being set to achieve more in less time. You are meant to spend less time at the expense of your ethics or the quality of your work or health. Time is of the essence.
Recently, artificial intelligence -AI- has been adamantly suggested as a strategy to cut back on time used in creating, wait for it, didactic resources. I'm not talking helper here. It was suggested we use prompts to create resources, substituting our writing. Educators design and draft resources to accompany our students in discovering an
