It’s 6:05 a.m. Thursday, and I am writing this because since 5 a.m. my wife, a 22-year full-time veteran at Crescent Harbor Elementary School with many prior years of substitute teaching in the Oak Harbor School District, just left for work, two hours early. Last evening, after a CHAMPS roller skating event, she arrived home at about 6 p.m. That’s typical of most nights and it’s not the commute. We live 12 miles from school.

I had the opportunity to browse letters to the editor, Nov. 16, between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m., while she was placing a book order for the school, and happened to read Mr. William Burnett’s letter. He seems like a literate, well educated individual. And I respect his right to seek direct teacher-to-student interaction for the benefit of the children. My gut reaction to Mr. Burnett’s letter, however, was that teachers don’t really appear to do much for their salaries.

For any number of reasons, in many cases, schools and primary classroom educators have even become surrogate parents if you will, for many children, and for many reasons. They have before and after school interaction with children and parents, they act as detectives if you will, finding out why children are having difficulty with learning, getting them to specialists, augmenting nutritional assistance by helping get them to breakfast, lunch, and perform other positive events after school, in addition to teaching them their sums, reading and writing skills. We all should be worried about the costs of education, but from my wife you received the following (a conservative 170 days’ annual estimate) for your tax dollars over her career:

1. 22,440 unpaid hours over the last 22 years in the classroom.

2. An additional two hours every evening grading papers, writing notes to or calling parents to see how they could work collaboratively to help improve their children’s education, or 7,480 hours over 22 years when she gets home from about 6 to 8 p.m.

3. My tax return reveals we spend something more than $1,000 annually out of pocket on average to buy school supplies for her classroom students/school contributions. And I could go on ad nauseum about the struggles teachers have, trying to help turn out children smarter than they got them from out community with absent parents, curriculum changes when the next greatest thing comes along, and attempting to teach children who have special needs in a mainstream classroom. Put a dollar amount on that emotional thought.

I have no idea what Mr. Burnett does for a living, his political affiliation or his faith, but somehow and somewhere, some overworked, underpaid teacher taught him to be a well educated, literate thinker. And I suspect he contracted for the best job he could get, because he was intelligent. Where’d he learn how to do that?

I have kept my counsel for 22 years, but know this: When a service academy graduate grabbed my wife in front of Safeway and gave her a big hug some years ago, and could barely read when he entered her third/fourth grade classroom, it does choke one up. It did me. She didn’t teach him to read, she helped make him a citizen. And I know many more like her. My wife and many of her colleagues are not stealing their salaries, they are dedicated and are not being paid for a lot of teaching they do. They generally do it in a place where it’s never seen, and they put in the extra hours not because they can’t get a handle of the job, but because “it’s for the kids” (William Burnett).

We do seem to keep over-inflating the right front tire, when the one on the left rear is flat. Speaking of that, drive by a school after classes or on a weekend. Those cars there belong to teachers, folks.

Oh, and if you are reading this, thank a teacher. If Mr. Burnett was not being critical of classroom teachers, my abject apologies. Going after the legislators is fine  with me.

Herb Johnson lives in Oak Harbor.