by Brian O'Sullivan
Union leaders say the traditionally high status of teachers in Ireland is under threat due to a combination of issues such as pay, workload, limited promotional posts and the growing complexity of the job. So, is teaching still an attractive profession? We asked delegates at teachers’ unions annual gatherings. —“Is Teaching Still an Attractive Profession?” The Irish Times, April 11, 2023
Orla Ryng told The Irish Times that “that magic
of being in the classroom is still there.” That magic
turns a student’s face from the cell phone’s dim light
to the brightness of a peer and an idea. That magic
turns some paper mache into a volcano, and it
turns jumbled numbers into that kind of magic
spell mathematicians call a formula, and it even turns
the mangled words of social media into that magic
that I—and you, I bet?—value just about the most:
Words that leap and love and shout that magic,
which is to say poetry, will never die. And it’s with words
and letters that teachers are rewarded—like that magic
“N.T.” that got dangled off the ends of National Teachers’ names
in Ireland. My dad, being Irish, seemed to believe in that magic;
he asked, as I trudged through grad school, when I’d
be getting “the letters after [my] name,” that magic
“Ph.D.,” and I thought he was just teasing me, but later
I knew that even he, a practical guy, valued that magic
of letters. But letters don’t pay rent, and so Sean
Maher lives with his parents, still valuing that magic
That devalues him. Economists may
say that if you get good money and you also get that magic,
then you’ve been paid twice. ‘No one goes into teaching
expecting huge wages,” says Eoin Fenton; that magic
serves in place of huge wages, and asking for both money and magic
might be hubris. But would it, in the end, be all that tragic?
Brian O'Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric in southern Maryland. He has had creative writing published in ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, and Every Day Fiction.
