The frog in boiling water- educators and money

Money is a topic that is still not often spoken about within education. We see memes shared on social media about how ‘teachers teach for the outcome not the income’, and there is often a sense that educators shouldn’t expect to be paid well.

Yet all too often the result of this reluctance to discuss money, and of educators accepting low pay, is that excellent teachers are forced out of the profession through poverty or ill-health or both, a situation which serves no-one.

Is it not possible to be interested in both student outcomes AND teacher incomes?

In my recent live discussion on LinkedIn with Karin Heuert Galv?o , a teacher mentor, based in Sao Paolo, Brazil, she made the excellent point that the reluctance to talk about money starts in our education system. It’s rare for primary or secondary curricula to cover even quite basic financial literacy, leaving people with little understanding of how to budget, or the impact of interest rates on both savings and borrowing, or the need to invest in a pension.

Teacher education is no different. In fact, speaking as a tutor on the initial teacher training course, the CELTA, over a 12 year period in the mid 90s to late 2000s, I don’t remember ever discussing money, other than to point out to trainees that they shouldn’t expect to earn much working in a language school.

However, looking back over my career, I think there has been a gradual shift in what we mean by ‘not earning much’. I spent 10 years working outside my home country (the UK) back in the 90s, and, while I never earned that much in terms of being able to save (and 20 something me would have considered paying into a pension boring and unnecessary), I was actually quite comfortable by local standards. I could afford to travel a lot, go out for food most nights, and so on. How many young teachers working in language schools, or for the big platforms like Preply and Cambly, can say the same these days?

It feels as if as a profession we have found ourselves in a situation like the metaphor of the frog in boiling water. Put the frog into a pan of boiling water and they will immediately jump out, but start with the water cold, and gradually heat it up and they won’t notice the increasing heat until it’s too late. It’s a horrible metaphor, but I think an apt one.

If you are living in a city like Barcelona and being paid 10 euros an hour, which is far from uncommon, you definitely won’t have a remotely comfortable lifestyle, never mind be able to save for the future. Many teachers take on these kind of roles, thinking that they have to ‘pay their dues’ and that they will get the experience and qualifications to enable them to earn more later. But when a CELTA tutor, for which role you need to be highly experienced and qualified, is getting paid not much more nowadays than I was receiving for the same job nearly twenty years ago, where is the reward for hard work and sacrifice?

When I started working with language teaching professionals as a coach, some five or six years ago, my initial focus was largely on stress management and burnout. But after a while I realised that, while I could help people to manage their stress more effectively, the bottom line was that it was not possible for most of them to do their jobs, with the hours they were expected to work, and the pay they were receiving, without being overwhelmed and stressed.

Increasingly I found myself advising and helping people to leave their jobs and set up their own businesses, where they could be free to find a pool of clients who would more fully appreciate their skills and experience and be willing to pay for their expertise. Where they could have more control over their working lives.

This isn’t always an easy road to take, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but at least there are options, and the growth of the online world, and easy and relatively cheap access to technology such as Zoom and online course platforms, has opened up opportunities for individuals that simply weren’t there a decade or more ago.

We need to stop shaming ourselves and other educators for caring about making money, because, while most educators aren’t that interested in making lots of money for its own sake, most of us care very much about the freedom and opportunities to live a balanced and enjoyable life that having enough money can bring. And why shouldn’t we?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of this in the comments.

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Want my support in creating your freelance business, or making it work better for you? Find out more about my group programme, Designed to Flourish here.

Here’s the link to the live interview with Karin Heuert Galvao which sparked this newsletter.

And I recommend following Nicola Prentis ?? , an alumna of my group programme, who now helps educators (and others) get the financial education we seem to need so badly.