Not living on a teacher’s salary…I’m not even in the profession yet, or even taking classes, but already I find myself defending the proud vocation of teaching. In a May 27, 2009 piece in Teacher Magazine titled “Do Teachers Lack Power and Self-Worth?”, Anthony Cody takes TV financial guru Suze Orman to task for comments about teachers’ lack of empowerment based on lack of pay in a New York Times Magazine feature titled “Suze Orman Is Having a Moment”. “[Orman] has been reluctant to work on school curricula on personal finance,” the New York Times feature read, “because she says students can’t learn empowerment from people who aren’t empowered, and teachers, she says, are too underpaid ever to have any real self-worth. She told me: ‘When you are somebody scared to death of your own life, how can you teach kids to be powerful? It’s not something in a book — it ain’t going to happen that way.’” Cody begins attacking Orman only to back off and give her a pass. I’m not that generous.
Cody’s sensible enough to see the flaw in Orman’s reasoning that empowerment is equated with monetary compensation. Unfortunately, that false equivalence pervades our “$20 million per year athlete” society. In the paragraph immediately after Orman’s comments above, the author quotes a story from one of Orman’s books in which she recalls her father running back into his burning store to retrieve the money in the register. Unable to open the register, Orman’s father picked up the searing hot metal and carried it outside, badly burning himself. “The money was that important,” Orman concluded. “That was when I learned that money is obviously more important than life itself.” The wrongness of that statement stands for itself. If her father had never come back out of that burning building, I doubt she would have written those words.
Cody tries to draw something positive from Orman’s words in finding truth in the idea that teachers need to embody what they teach. Only someone who teaches from a confident, caring place can instill confidence and caring in students. Any parent knows that most of what their children learn is by modeling. You smoke, it’s most likely that they’ll smoke, for example. Do as I say and not as I do doesn’t work. But I still can’t get over the idea that teachers are “scared to death” of their own lives, as Orman puts it. Orman paints teaching as an escape from the “real world.” Personally, I want to leave that “real world” of corporate soullessness behind. For me, the classroom represents possibility and potential for changing that “real world” for the better, one mind at a time. It begins with tapping into my own potential for growth and, yes, empowerment, which I’ll do my best to model to my students.
If I’m generous at all towards Orman it will be in acknowledging that celebrity financial gurus are often asked questions out of their comfort zone. Orman knows IRAs, not NCLB. Just because someone puts a microphone in front of you, doesn’t mean that you have anything of value to say. Orman should have resisted commenting, but the temptation to be a know-it-all can be irresistible sometimes. If anything, her comments should inspire teachers to prove her wrong. Ironically, Suze Orman’s wrong-headed thoughts on empowerment might end up being empowering themselves.
