The speaker thinks that to be a teacher is more difficult than to be the president of the NEA.

Thank you for inviting me to share my thoughts with you this evening. As you can imagine, being the president of the NEA is a demanding job and in many ways it’s an important job. But for 25 years, I had a job that was more demanding and more important. I was a teacher. My first year in the classroom, I wasn’t a member of my local teacher’s union in Danbury Connecticut. I didn’t see the need, but very quickly, the going got tough. In college, I didn’t take a single geography course and my first assignment was to teach, you guess it, Geography. I admit that in my first year, I was not a very good teacher and I was not the only one. I remember another poorly prepared first-year teacher saying to me, "Bob, I find myself spending a lot of time in the bathroom. It’s the only place in the school where I know what I’m doing. " Not only was I totally on my own, I realized that my colleagues were mostly in the same predicament—professionally isolated, powerless, voiceless in the large affairs of the school. So I did the rational thing. I joined the local teacher’s union and my point is this—didn’t go into teaching to become a union activist. I became a union activist in order to become a better teacher, in order to advance my profession, in order to give teachers a voice in making their schools more effective places for teaching and learning. Teaching may in fact be the world’s second oldest profession, but as a practical matter, this profession is still very much in its infancy, especially when compared to fully articulated profession such as law and medicine. We have yet too truly professionalized the craft of teaching. Think about it, people go into teaching for the most noble, unselfish motivations. We have this crazy idea that maybe, just, maybe, they could make a difference in the lives of children, in the lives of our students, and so we get up every day and go to work in make-shift classrooms. We reconcile ourselves to inadequate paychecks and to too little respect. In the cafeteria, we deal with insanitary pizza a day. We put up with administrators who told us as if we were six-year-olds and six-year-olds who told us as if they were administrators. Teachers deserve the best, but instead, we confront a system, a status quote in public education that utterly fails to support us in our work. By and large, the undergraduate experience of most new teachers does not adequately prepare them for the shocks and challenges of the real world classroom. The vast majority of most new teachers nationwide receive no mentoring, whatsoever, no induction process worthy of the name and for veteran teachers, the picture is not much brighter. In most school districts, professional development is a joke. In-service workshops, Satan gate sessions usually at the end of a long day of teaching are mostly a disservice, so I’m not in a least bit surprised that some 50％ of teachers leave the profession within 5 years. What surprises me, given this systematic neglect, is that 50％ stay. So we have a responsibility to work together collaboratively to transform the experience of young people who are seeking a career as teachers.