Now you’ve done it.

You’ve pissed off the last remaining good teachers. And good luck finding/recuruiting new ones.

Fourteen years ago I walked out of college with a music education degree, took a look at the sacrifices I was going to have to make to get a job, let alone keep the job, be happy at the job, and make money at the job. My fellow graduates had to relocate to the only places they could get teaching jobs — Vegas, DC, the Carolinas. They were in bad schools with bad kids making bad money. As music teachers, they were forced to distribute their time between multiple schools and face deeper and deeper budget cuts. They were forced to thinly veil standardized test lessons as music.

“Nah,” I thought. I enrolled in a professional writing program and never looked back. Never has it been truer and more literal for me to say, “I dodged a bullet.”

Fourteen years later, many of my classmates are still teaching, still fighting that fight. Budgets are worse. Kids are worse. Parents are worse. School boards are worse. Or at least time has compounded them to feel worse. And now this.

When we think of teachers, we envision sweet, kind, selfless people who take on the burden of teaching and even partially raising your kids. Many fit that narrative. But ask any teacher you trust — they, just like all of us, have some batshit crazy coworkers. Not all teachers are wonderful, selfless people. Some of them used to be, but you’ve beaten them down with bad contracts, bad kids, and bad lesson plans for decades, and now, when they’re thiiiis close to retirement, they’re just trying to serve their time and get out. And I can’t blame them.

“Teachers” are hard enough to find. Good teachers are harder. For decades we’ve debated what makes one teacher better than another, and how salary factors in (within the complex world of geography, tax structures, and public versus private schools) with no easy answers. But almost everyone agrees — there are plenty of bad teachers and not enough good ones. And it’s no wonder why. It’s not the most attractive job.

Picture a classroom.

You probably already did it wrong. Did you picture rows of desks with kids sitting at them, pencil in hand taking notes? Cute.

Picture a real classroom. The teacher is trying to explain to a 14 year-old that, no, he can’t leave without a hall pass. Because the teacher was distracted, another kid snaps the bra strap of the girl in front of him, and she has turned around and hit him. The teacher’s phone lights up with the number of the parent who calls four times a day to complain about a detention that was assigned a month ago. An email pops up in the corner of the teacher’s screen from the superintendent. Subject line: “Budget amendment. Mandatory meeting Tuesday.” The teacher turns away from the hall pass kid to address the bra strap situation. Hall pass kid tells the teacher to eat shit. The classroom door opens. Surprise! It’s a kid with a gun, and he’s here to kill all of them.

Talk about a thankless job.

And now you’ve really done it.

You expect that teacher to put his or her life on the line to defend these little shits that the teacher has already dedicated the rest of their energy to. (Note: Of course, your kid isn’t a little shit. We’re talking about somebody else’s kid.)

This isn’t just a bad deal for current teachers. This is a bad deal for future teachers. I’d love to know how many college students switched majors from education to something else this week. Think about it. Who in the world wants to go do this with their life? You want the best schools and the best education and the best teachers for your kid. Where are you going to find that teacher? Who’s going to volunteer? (And it is practically volunteering, by the way, but teacher salaries is a blog for another day.)

Teachers are speaking out. Social media is flooded with their thoughts, and all of us should be reading them. Teachers are responsible for the future. And they hate this. Even the ones who are fine carrying guns are mad, because the whole situation is maddening.

Listen to teachers. Fix this. Nobody in their right mind would sign up for this.