After a numbing session of question and non-answer in the 11th-grade English class, the teacher finally asked, "Who didn't read the book?" There followed a pause resembling the closing seconds of a reality show, when the contestants are waiting to learn which one of them will be sent away forever. But, confident that there was strength in numbers, I slowly raised my hand.
It was the only one to go up.
"Mr. Bongiovi, see me after class," said the teacher.
I approached his desk as nervous as the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz's corridor. He poked me once in the chest — a proud poke — and said, "You're the only one in class who told the truth."
With that simple statement, Mr. Patrick J. Sullivan, an English teacher at Manhattan's Regis High School, taught me the pride of being honest. That poke, startling at the time, became a symbolic prod, urging me to remember the significance of my every word, nod or gesture. Some 43 years later, I can still feel that forefinger touching my chest.
"A teacher touches eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops," wrote Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams. Patrick Sullivan touched my eternity.
I hope I've influenced many similar epiphanies through my 37 years as a high school (and now college) teacher. I've been told of at least a few.
A student repeating 10th grade once deviated drastically from an assigned essay topic with a far-fetched, disconnected narrative about pilfering donuts from a local bakery.
He'd expected to shock me, even at the expense of a decent grade. When I complimented his diction and imagination, he was stunned. He passed English 10, became a lyricist for a rock band and now writes his own material as a performance artist in New York City.
"Nobody ever looked past me and my antics and considered my work," he told me years later. That was a Henry Adams moment.
Teaching matters — in the classroom, in athletics and in extracurricular activities. It matters in hours well beyond the school day and in venues well beyond the school grounds. We all remember the teacher, or several teachers, who shaped us in unexpected, spontaneous ways.
But rarely a week goes by that there isn't a letter to the editor or a comment in the news attacking teachers' salaries and benefits. Writers' indignation is often sincerely expressed and raises a fair question: How much is a teacher worth? Which leads to the question: What are we willing to pay?
A large body of research shows that teachers are the single most significant factor in student learning success — potentially eight times more valuable than any other single component, including technology, curriculum or testing.
The reason seems simple enough. In this equation, the teacher provides the only human, one-on-one influence; interaction that is communication at its most elemental and personal.
A teacher's workweek cannot be measured by time spent in the school building. Lesson planning, grading, research for the curriculum, professional development, finding, procuring and preparing class materials — activities that will strengthen tomorrow's experience for the students — usually occur after school.
A teacher easily compresses 12 months of work into 10. Being "on" for young people many hours a day, paying attention to their individual needs as well as the group's, meeting with parents, attending to faculty business — plus outside grading and preparation — leave many feeling they'd like a break in the intensity.
As it is, the merest minority can afford to take off for two months every summer. Most supplement their income. Many apply their professional skills as summer school teachers, lifeguards, camp counselors or tutors. Or the work takes the form of furthering their own learning: graduate courses, teaching workshops, travel for research.
The compensation issues become particularly intense with education because teachers are like no other role models. They are with their students — and were with each of us when we were students — every day of the school year, at least seven hours a day for up to 12 years or more.
Consequently, we each think (often falsely) that we know and can judge what a teacher does.
The antagonism is rooted in the fact that taxpayers have only one place to directly say "No!" to higher taxes: the school budget vote. Even while most budgets pass, schools account for a high proportion of property tax bills, so teachers are linked in the public mind with anger over high taxes.
Then there is a national climate set by the No Child Left Behind law, which holds teachers accountable by tracking standardized test scores, as if what we do in children's lives can be so simply measured.
There are good teachers and poor teachers. There are good (pick an occupation) and bad (pick an occupation). Teachers are and should be held accountable.
Besides NCLB requirements, the Obama administration is urging that automatic step increases be replaced with merit pay. In my view, no discussion such as this should be off the table, as long as it is a dialogue, not a top-down monologue and, more significantly, students benefit.
Even with tenure, districts are not handcuffed into retaining bad teachers with no recourse. Programs in professional development, mandated mentoring and even legal processes for removal, though time-consuming and potentially costly, are available.
More reasonably, the solution lies in the years prior to granting tenure, when administrators, academic coaches, graduate education courses and mandated professional development is used to enhance each new teacher's skills, awareness and craft.
Research shows that across the nation, almost half of the new teachers hired for the coming school year will not be teaching within five years, some because they are not up to the task, some because they can't afford to!
This gets us back to the question: What are we willing to pay teachers?
Can we afford to devalue the life lessons that are occurring on a daily basis and then lasting nearly forever? With teachers and teaching the single most significant influence in the success of the educational process, why are they expected to be bargains?
Stephen Bongiovi, the 2006 state Teacher of the Year, is a retired Seaford English teacher and adjunct at Molloy College. This originally appeared in Newsday.