Leslie Snow - WUOT-FM -

Knoxville, TN - It’s early August and U-T’s summer school session is winding down. Students in the Haslam business building are huddled over computers and rifling through flashcards as they prepare for finals. A few take the time to explain why they decided not to pursue a career in education.

“It’s an honorable profession but they’re not compensated enough."

"I do not think teachers are respected nearly as much as they should be."

"Honestly, probably pay. The stress I mean there’s so many students."

"The job, great. Living and eating and breathing on the salary-not so much.”

Hunter BrimiFarragut High School in West Knoxville. He says he understands why so many students are reluctant to become teachers.
       
“We are a society that is extrinsically motivated. We are product oriented we are consumeristic. We want to be able to buy the nicest stuff. That’s human nature. We want to have good stuff. You can’t do that if you go into teaching.”

The starting salary for a new teacher in Knox county schools is about 33-thousand dollars.

“You know you’re dealing with a complicated issue in how to attract the best and brightest. Because the best and the brightest look at the world, they see how it works, they see the game they need to play to get what they want and education is not the path to get those things,” says Brimi.

“Attracting strong students into education is an acknowledged challenge.”

That’s Susan Benner. She heads up U-T’s Department for Theory and Practice in Teacher Education. She believes teaching isn’t well-respected. And that keeps some students from pursuing a career in education.

“I think there is a cultural prejudice against the field, and there is a lot of denigration of it, certainly pop culture ridicules teaching, ridicules education,” says Benner. “Watch the TV shows, watch the movies, there are a few that make education a worthy aspiring kind of a thing but most of them are ridiculing it and really making teachers look like buffoons.”

Perception isn’t the only problem. Monty Howell, human resource supervisor for Knox County Schools, believes stress is another factor that draws students away from teaching.

Howell says, “Schools are a microcosm of society, society is having more problems, more issues; we have more problems more issues in the classroom. Chewing gum used to be the major discipline problem and now we have teachers dealing with weapons being brought in the school so definitely there is a change and that is stressful.”

Even ordinary days can be taxing.

“Someone in the classroom has to be willing to put up with so many distractions to make hundreds of decisions during the day,” says Howell.

And yet there are students willing, and even eager to take on the challenges of the classroom. On a rainy Friday afternoon Katy Tanner sits in the Claxton education building and talks about becoming a teacher.

“People say to me all the time 'You know, 4.0 student why do want to be a teacher? You could do so much better things with your life,” says Tanner.
 

“And I want my students to go home every day and say I really love my math teacher and she’s awesome and I hope to affect more than just their math education I want to help them in real life in becoming a better citizen, in becoming a better person and hopefully their parents will see that and say wow that’s an awesome teacher,” says Tanner.

She knows it won’t be easy. She understands the demands of the profession and hopes she can get by on her starting salary.

“I mean everybody just says to marry rich but we’ll see.”

In Knoxville, I’m Leslie Snow.

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