Teacher's Pay Conversations Project

[Kerry]

Teacher's Pay Conversations Project

The Teacher's Pay Conversations Project is a series of conversations about acknowledgment.

The premise is that pay is an acknowledgment. So too is withholding pay. Pay is a communication. Making teachers pathetically beg for salaries or facility repairs or school supplies is the way we let teachers know (albeit it irresponsibly and covertly) that we don't know how else to communicate our deep-seated resentments for letting us slide—poor penmanship, incorrect grammar, lousy math skills, etc.

Unsatisfactory teacher salaries mirror the collective leadership-communication skills of educators. The leadership-communication skills it would take to produce financial parity with skilled laborers—electricians, plumbers and carpenters—are the same skills it takes to communicate subject matter.

Read about the Teacher's Pay Conversations Project.

[Wolf]

So, are we subtly paying back all the teachers WE didn't like, by being unable to communicate our own high value to the community.  Is this part of the perpatration withhold?  Are we acting like a codependent abused party somehow has decided that he really deserves to be punished for years for some forgotten error or action, so we can (so I can) be right about how poorly educators are treated?

[Kerry]

Hi Wolf,

Thanks for your post. I’ll reply line by line.

Re: “So, are we subtly paying back all the teachers WE didn't like,” I doubt if many would agree with your use of the word “we.”  I can’t answer for you. For myself, it was never a conscious decision to write illegibly. Like most others, my poor penmanship has been an unconscious communication. I didn’t know it then but I was unconsciously reaching out to see if the teacher was worthy of me doing my best. In truth I never experienced being in communication with any teacher. My penmanship teacher communicated, nonverbally, that she did not mean what she said, “Turn in your cursive homework neatly or you’ll have to repeat the class.” What I do know is that there are very few, if any, teachers who could not work with a single student and cause that one student to have legible penmanship. Something happens when a teacher sells out and accepts more students then he/she is qualified to teach. Each teacher has his/her student load for which they know they can be held responsible to communicate subject matter. I.e. “You can trust me to be able to teach 10 students to be able to....”  For certain there are some students with physical/mental/home-life problems that hinder coordination but a teacher (as opposed to someone in the process of becoming a teacher) knows to refer that student to professionals.

Likewise, I doubt whether many would acknowledge that they are paying back teachers for not teaching. Teacher pay is an unconscious impersonal communication. No parent is forced to make the judgment between say, paying teachers $39K or $89K, instead a parent irresponsibly sets it up for others (legislators) etc. to pay teachers as little as possible. This covert acknowledgment can't help but have undesirable effects. My experience as a communication-skills coach has proven to me that it has profound effects and that it does bother everyone at some level. I suspect if we were all doing well finacially that we'd be more than willing, in fact obligated, to pay each teacher an appropriate and satisfying wage.

Re: “Is this part of the perpatration withhold?” [sic] My understanding is that that each of us have a unique set of standards and ethics. What may be unethical or a perpetration for me may not be one for you. For example: Overdosing on sugar is for me a perpetration whereas for others it’s not. It may not bother the majority that teachers don’t make as much as carpenters but it does me.

Re: “Are we acting like a codependent abused party...” again, your use of the word “we” makes it difficult to communicate.  What I got is that you don’t see yourself as acting like a codependent ...” This I can get.

Re: “deserves to be punished for years for some forgotten error or action,” I take it that you are not consciously punishing yourself or your penmanship teacher. During 3-hr consultations over the past 30 years I’ve never run across someone who, with coaching, was not willing to look at the possibility that they have in fact been punishing themselves for each and every verbally unacknowledged perpetration. We’re simply too honest to win (to achieve and sustain the experience of love, prosperity, and health) without cleaning up the messes. You’d be amazed at what it does for all of ones relationships to tell, say your mother, that you suddenly had the memory of lying to her when she asked if you had brushed your teeth (for most that’s one of the first lies.) —many honestly (arrogantly) believe it’s not effecting outcomes to this very day. I know of no education program for teachers that requires student teachers to participate in a life-time integrity clearing process; as such a teacher can't be certain if a misbehaving student is mirroring an out integrity of the teacher's.

Re: “...forgotten....” Consciously yes, however the memory of each action is recorded. Most of us pile more perpetrations on top of the firsts (first lie, first theft, first abuse of another, first deceit). As with all truths and all lies each have their own consequences. Many of us are still paying ourselves back, (however unaware we may be) for childhood perpetrations.

Thanks, for sharing your thoughts. For certain we need more of these kinds of conversations.

Kerry

[Wolf]

My use of the word "We" is intended to show that I am including myself in the group.  Including myself in the whole embarrassing show, which also includes looking for a better-paying low adjunct wages, sometimes.  Why is it that the 'we' convention makes response difficult?  I do not understand your use of the language.  Am I hiding in a "crowd" of "We"?

[Kerry]

Hi Wolf,

It’s a bit tricky communicating about “I” vs “We” because I don’t have your permission to coach you with your communication skills. You operate from what’s referred to as the adversarial communication model (it’s the one we learned from our parents who learned it from their teachers). I favor the intentional communication model. The two models are not just different, it’s as though they were English and Martian (truly outside the box). I’ve virtually lost my ability to communicate with educators (using their communication model) other than with those intent on communication mastery.

Re: “Am I hiding in a "crowd" of "We"?” Depending upon how powerful you’re willing to be it’s much worse than that. I’ll take your question to be rhetorical because if I say, “yes” or “no” then you will either accept it or reject it as a truth. The ideal is to shorten the amount of time it takes for you to arrive at your truth.

Thanks,

Kerry

[Kerry]

Hi Wolf:

Thanks so much for the offering to help with "web-site stuff.” I'm totally open to you editing the Tpay website, be it editing correcting, re-writing, or redesigning it. My purpose has been to stimulate conversations such as we are having. All conversations, no matter ones position, are necessary steps towards parity. Far too many are sitting on their positions nonverbally. Most are unaware that they have a position and therefore don't know the power of their position about teacher's pay.

Jacques Cousteau, when asked what it will take to heal the planet, said, "What's needed is a benevolent dictator.” I'm certain today he would have said a "...green dictator."  It's a challenge to communicate about education without making educators wrong. I asked Werner Erhard (est) how do I make a diff when I'm so self-righteous and so addicted to make-wrong, how do I communicate with someone who is blatantly wrong. He replied, "You've got this no-abuse thing wrong. When someone is wrong they are wrong and it's your responsibility to tell them so." Thirty years later and I'm still working on how to deliver a sentence that is truthful yet not abusive or invalidating.

Re: “...rather they knowingly submit....” When I was in Vietnam I killed and thought I was a good soldier and proud that I killed so well. If you had asked me back then did I knowingly volunteer to be an Airborne Infantry Officer I would have said, “Of course, what a silly question.” Now, 40 years later, I know that I was not awake back then and so anything I did “knowingly” was relative to my awareness at the time. My point being, I don't get that most teachers operate from choice. They are so out-integrity that they have lost their ability to choose.

Thanks also for your willingness to get my communications—the combination of poor grammar and the challenging subject matter can get in the way of communication taking place.
 
Kerry

PS. We use FrontPage 2003, our themes are all store bought.

[Wolf]

I’ve virtually lost my ability to communicate with educators (using their communication model) other than with those intent on communication mastery.

This must make the whole area of conversation surrounding teachers' pay very challenging.  Even as an educator, I have discovered that I cannot teach somebody if I cannot get through to him.

You have my expressed and implied permission to coach me in communications mastery.

[Kerry]

Hi Wolf,

Re: “This must make the whole area of conversation surrounding teachers' pay very challenging.” It keeps me awake. I’ve also been addicted to abuse, both incoming and outgoing. Every time I think of a new way to approach, say the Superintendent of Schools, I run it past the VP of Community Communications. He laughs and jokingly asks me, “Are you sure you want to get all beaten up again?” He’s right. For me it’s suicidal (contra-aliveness) to engage in a conversation with an educator because they are, unbeknownst to themselves, stuck in adversary. Invariably I walk away experiencing invalidation with thoughts that it’s hopeless to try and fix the system. What appears to them as a simple clarifying question is an unconsciously veiled self-righteous opinion, an argument. They have no choice. Like a fish in water they can’t see the water. My far greater challenge is to acknowledge to myself and anyone listening that once again, in the middle of a conversation, I’ve become stuck in self-righteousness, me knowing and educators not knowing. Such meetings always reveal how far I have to go. I joke and say that I’m coming of age, now is my time. I find people are much more willing to listen to me because I look wiser. What preserves my sanity is that underneath all my thoughts the truth is it ain’t them. It’s my inability to cause communication to take place. For all practical purposes I’m back in grade school with the same inability to experience communication with any teacher, all the while each teacher believing they are in communication with me. Part of what motivates me is knowing that there are millions of kids who have no sense at all what it’s like to be in communication with someone anyone. Myself, I had never had an experience of communication until age 32 —after all this early career stuff (About Us).

Thanks for permission to coach you. I’d like to go back to your first post. The way the mind works is if it experiences something that doesn’t feel good it tries to be with the conversation that follows but in truth is not totally there. It’s incomplete about the earlier sentence that didn’t feel good. I used to try and communicate on top of an upset and wondered why things would get bogged down. Now I know enough to go back and get complete. If we didn’t complete that first post for ourselves then we’d get bogged down later—most people have no way of knowing/tracing the beginning of the end. It’s going to require a lot of willingness on your part to get, to recreate, me. With coaching it works to create that you are causing me to say what I’m saying. This prevents arguments.

What you might notice from our conversations is that you will hear yourself engaged in futile arguments that don’t make a difference, that or standing by empowering BS with your very presence. After observing a few of these interactions you will begin to have a choice, right in the middle of the conversation, to extract yourself. I have done thousands of one-on-one 3-hr coaching sessions over that past 30 years. Only once was I able to go the whole three hours without me hearing a lie. Most people lie so much they can no longer hear their own lies. Invariably it shocks them when I point out their lie.

Let’s begin with: “So, are we subtly paying back all the teachers WE didn't like, by being unable to communicate our own high value to the community?” Can you see why this didn’t feel good to read? Yes? No?  It will work to ask yourself-- why would I cause Kerry to ask? Here’s a tip: If another person tells you, “That didn’t feel good” then it’s you, no matter what your mind says. Put another way, if you set up someone to tell you your communication didn’t feel good, then that’s your integrity at work, unconsciously setting it up to get caught for being abusive. We set each other up to provide feedback. When our integrity is out we search for someone who won’t support abuse. This prompts me to invite you to do The Clearing Process (it’s free). Do a total of five clearings one per day.

You read the website and parts of what you read you agreed with and parts conflicted with your reality. Something you read, it’s a specific sentence, upset you. Not angry upset but that it prevented you from completely being with the next sentence. This is called out-integrity. You were humming along and in-integrity (at least relatively so) whole and complete, nothing missing nothing added, and you came across a sentence. Because you aren’t complete with the topic of the sentence your mind kept you from being here now with the next sentence. You went even more unconscious. You wrote, “So are we...” instead of, “I don’t agree....” or “I can see that some people may be paying themselves and teachers back but it doesn’t ring true for me.” Your para is in fact a question for yourself but it’s veiled as a generalization. “We’ as opposed to, “I’m having a hard time getting that I have been paying back teachers for them selling out on me in high school.” For example: Had you read, “All teachers carry guns.” Your mind, because it’s clear about such things, would have dismissed the sentence as blatantly false and gone on to the next sentence or closed the web page. It’s doubtful you would have taken the time to write and argue. Many readers do argue with givens. They are addicted to arguing and, like an alcoholic, need their fix of abusing or being abused for the day. We simply don’t argue with things we know. That which we know we are complete. Our mind gets it and goes on to the next sentence.

I’ll stop here.

Kerry

[Wolf]

Yes.  I have that habit of adversarial communication.  I am also aware that the words I speak, with their connotations and habitual use create for me a sort of reality that does not transfer completely to others, as you have a different set of connotations and habitual usage surrounding those words,  The reality you create, based on a personal interpretation that is unknown to me, may or may not be detectable to me before I start the next sentence. 
By extension, isn't it amazing that so much information gets past the gate? 

May I ask your permission to coach you?  I ask not because I think I have anything to teach you, but because it gives me let to say what I really think and to meet as equals.

I have had the opportunity to talk to several Landmark Forum leaders, as I took the Fourm and assisted at various Landmark Education courses for the next year and a half.   My cozy little worldview was confronted every day.  I got that my life is empty and meaningless, and that it doesn't matter that it is empty and meaningless.  I get that I have no integrity and cannot make a commitment.

If you haven't attended a Landmark Forum lately, I expect you would find revisiting interesting. 
I am aware that "I" is carefully hidden behind a Character (Clint Eastwood playing the outlaw Josie Wales playing the Lone Ranger) who uses my strong suits (Intelligence, mildness, troubleshooting) to mask an Act that turns upon a certain, impossible, 5-year-old-child's semantic point (I never make mistakes) that I believe others take to be me.  I get that much of my life has been spent in defense of that indefensible semantic point. 

I really got that most people, including me, most of the time, are running on scripts from the past that their pattern-finding (meaning-making) machine pulls from the archive in reaction to the very smallest recognition of pattern.  This means me, too.  Every person at some point can come upon a situation that their meaning-making machine cannot pattern-match to something, and then creative thinking actually occurs. 

I was looking for the edges of reality before I encountered Landmark but it was the single biggest awake moment until that point.  It opened me up to possibilities I had never realized I was not seeing - possibilities that reside in the area that I didn't know that I didn't know. 

Where Landmark lost its luster to me was the point where it became plain that they were not running their business from the principles.  As freeing as the idea of "everything is possible through the practices of the Landmark Forum" is, their business is run on quota and "% of calls completed."  There is nothing wrong with that.  They have a very successful business.  It did give me an excuse to walk away from the Centre, but I cannot walk away from the insights I have had. 

I am aware that this is a process and not a destination. 

Thanks for permission to coach you. I’d like to go back to your first post. The way the mind works is if it experiences something that doesn’t feel good it tries to be with the conversation that follows but in truth is not totally there. It’s incomplete about the earlier sentence that didn’t feel good. I used to try and communicate on top of an upset and wondered why things would get bogged down. Now I know enough to go back and get complete. If we didn’t complete that first post for ourselves then we’d get bogged down later—most people have know way of knowing/tracing the beginning of the end. It’s going to require a lot of willingness on your part to get, to recreate, me. With coaching it works to create that you are causing me to say what I’m saying. This prevents arguments.

Your response was to ask "Who's this 'we?' I was talking about. 
I wanted to point out what I believe is almost always stepped over in any conversation about "what is wrong with fill in the blank.  There is no external cause.  Were there not something within me that goaded me to write the first sentence, I would have read your site and gone on to something else.  I doubt I would have even realized .." Yeppers, there is another fellah that agrees with ME"  Though undoubtably it would be there somewhere.

Perhaps my  question would have landed better phrased as an old Huna-type question, "What in me that has brought about this external appearance?" 
I know that I am quite capable of producing external effects that justify or support my underlying prejudices or "givens." 

What I am finding in my studies is that people always look for evidence to support their (possibly uninspected) underlying truths.  This has supported the Landmark assertion that we all run on scripts, most of the time. 
I am very attentive to rackets about how "The system is flawed" and "The governor needs to..."  I think that full transformation cannot tie itself to the product of the past.  The Socialists failed because they developed their new orders "in comparison to" the old order.  I have not developed a marvelous new system to replace the failed ways to get things done that we tried in the past, as this is bound to either fail or incorporate the ills of the past, like yet another "new republican" dictatorship.

I would say that the actual goals of "Education" are being well-realized.  Those are, preparing students to be passive receivers of the status quo.  I was educated in fairly rich counties where the schools were considered good or excellent, but there have to be people who will contentedly take the lower-rung jobs, even there. How better to prepare a large number of people for what they see themselves as a lesser spot at the table than incontrovertible evidence that they are a lesser person by means of grades and tests.  It wasn't personal.  "The test says you are a person who gets a "D" in English."  These caste-setting mechanisms are pervasive.  We are not honest enough to say that the tests are designed to reward a certain kind of cultural intelligence. 

I had an interesting conversation with a retired teacher who is 87 years old.  She taught in the Southern US, and said it was possible to tell the children and grandchildren of enslaved field-hands who were not allowed to speak their native languages nor taught much English.  She said that learning English well was considered "going over to the enemy."  This is understandable, but the practical result was to hold the children down in a system that prizes skills their families did not hold in high regard.

What do you think would happen in a learning environment that was not a slave to the status quo? 

[Kerry]

Hi Wolf,

Clients and my friends, we have an agreement, to reply within 72 hours, or, to let the other know approx when they will reply. The agreement sounds like it’s about courtesy but it’s also about supporting each other in being complete. To drop something (a communication) in someone’s space and then not reply timely controls the other. It keeps them in confusion, incomplete.  I refer to the time it took you to reply. “Kerry, I’ll reply to your post NLT 8/30” would have worked for me.

Re: “isn't it amazing that so much information gets past the gate?” Yes.

Re: “...permission to coach you?” No. From your posts it's clear that you have not been trained to coach. What you can do is communicate openly, honestly and spontaneously, zero thoughts withheld. It works amazingly well. If you'd like I'll work with you on your coaching skills. The prerequiste is to complete the Communication Skills Tutorial for Managers.

Re: “...for the next year and a half.” Are you presently taking courses or involved with Landmark?

Re: “I got that my life is empty and meaningless,” This indicates that you are not in the here and now. That may have been true when you first realized it, and, it may be true now. More importantly, it reveals that you communicate to be right as opposed to emptying your mind.  That you still believe this and that you are still dragging that thought around, apparently to invalidate yourself, indicates that you didn’t share it to be complete so as to start freshly this nanosecond. I would have preferred to read, “I had the realization that my life was empty and meaningless and so far I have yet to formulate a purpose that works for everyone.” It’s also possible to hear those words “empty and meaningless" and to understand them as a concept rather than to experience the fullness of it. It’s quite an ego shattering powerful realization; lots of pain and sadness followed with uncertainty. It creates space, which, if not filled with a purpose, fills itself with more of the old thoughts and stuff. Been there, done that. It appears that you came across that realization like some come across an answer to a koan; in other words, not as a result of knowing/bottoming out.

Re: “I am aware that "I" is carefully hidden behind a Character (Clint Eastwood playing the outlaw Josie Wales playing the Lone Ranger) who uses my strong suits (Intelligence, mildness, troubleshooting) to mask an Act that turns upon a certain, impossible, 5-year-old-child's semantic point (I never make mistakes) that I believe others take to be me.  I get that much of my life has been spent in defense of that indefensible semantic point.” This comes across as though you’re trying to teach me something. If so say it clean and with as few words as possible.

Re: “I really got that most people, including me, most of the time, are running on scripts from the past that their pattern-finding (meaning-making) machine pulls from the archive in reaction to the very smallest recognition of pattern.  This means me, too.  Every person at some point can come upon a situation that their meaning-making machine cannot pattern-match to something, and then creative thinking actually occurs.” I’m not getting you. It comes across as though you’re trying to impress me with how much you know. Your point is a what’s so—ergo so what —it’s as though you think I don’t know this.

Re: “I was looking for the edges of reality...” This is mere talk. It's not specific as to the result you wanted to produce. It's poetic but it doesn’t support you in being here now. Again, it’s a so what! It could be that you bore people with this kind of chatter. It will definitely keep you and those who relate with you stuck in more of the same. 

Re: “...it became plain that they were not running their business from the principles.” I came to a similar realization with Werner after assisting at est for 7 years.

Wolf, the rest of your post would require too much time to write all the feedback I have.

Re: “When our integrity is out we search for someone who won’t support abuse. This prompts me to invite you to do The Clearing Process (it’s free). Do a total of five clearings one per day.” Again you ignored me. This indicates that you are dragging around hundreds of incompletes; you simply aren’t operating in present time.

This conversation isn’t working for me. Please complete the five clearings before you post again.  Thank you.

Kerry