A doctor, a lawyer, an architect....a teacher?

My mother has always had high expectations for me. Once, when I was a teenager and resented all the pressure to succeed, she denied it. "You can be anything you want," she said. "A doctor, a lawyer, an architect...." I don't recall the list including "a teacher."        

It took her a while to accept managing editor of Yankee Magazine as a legitimate job (she thought if I had to be a journalist, I might as well be anchorman of the NBC Evening News), but when she did, she told me that she and Dad were taking me out of their will. I was doing fine, and my sisters needed the money more. I said that was okay with me.        

I waited a long time before telling my mother about my decision to leave Yankee and become a teacher. I knew what she would say about it, but she always manages to surprise me with the way she says it. This time, she said nothing for a long minute. Then she said, "You're back in the will."        

It could have been worse. A neighbor of mine in Dublin, I am told, learned of my decision and said, "He must have been canned. Nobody in his right mind would become a teacher." A colleague of mine in the ConVal English department, who gave up teaching for a while to build houses, then went back, told me that a friend of his assumed he had come into an inheritance.        

In last week's edition of TIME, there was a report that American elementary school teachers spend a billion dollars a year of their own money to buy additional supplies for their students. That's an average of $521 per teacher per year. First-year teachers, who are paid the least, spend the most, an average of $701 per year. "This profession attracts a special breed," the magazine quoted of the people who did the study. "Obviously they're not in it for the money."        

She's right. And that's what made it all the more ironic a few weeks ago, when Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said that public schools need to do a better job of teaching students "financial literacy." At first I was dismayed; then I laughed out loud. Teachers are the last people on earth who should be in charge of inculcating financial literacy. If we were financially literate, we wouldn't be teachers!