“You want to be a teacher? Are you nuts?”

My granddaughter said this is what a family member said to her recently when he found out that she had changed her major and was now studying to become a secondary school English teacher.

There are a lot of present and former teachers in my family, including me. When I graduated from East Stroudsburg University, I was a French teacher for 2½ years before I took a full-time job in radio, then gravitated to newspapers when I found out that among the various hats I wore - program, news and sports director - the one I loved most was news. Even after I moved into communications full-time, I taught on an adjunct (part-time) basis at the high school and college levels for more than 30 years.

In addition to me, my stepson and his wife are teachers, my grandson’s fiancee teaches in the Stroudsburg district; my daughter-in law is a former teacher in the Northwestern Lehigh district; a niece teaches in the Palmerton district, another niece retired as an art teacher in Wisconsin and yet another is a retired speech language pathologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her husband was a department head at the University of Michigan and taught at Michigan State and the University of Arizona before his retirement.

Education is the passport to the future. I was fortunate that my immigrant mother was determined to give my brothers and me the opportunity to get a good education. She was willing to go to any lengths, make any sacrifice to see that it happened. As I told her on her 90th birthday: “Mom, you planted the seed of learning in my garden of knowledge, and I will be forever grateful for your persistence and support.”

I remember when I was a school-age youngster that teachers commanded the utmost respect. In my home, the teacher was almost a god. Granted, this may have been extreme, but my parents instilled in me great respect for my teachers and in their mission to educate me.

My teacher friends today say they yearn for those “good, old days.” Being a teacher today involves so much more than strictly the learning process and the techniques to encourage youngsters to learn.

Teachers are seeing their own impact being devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the students’ learning experiences.

Teachers are angry, because they believe they and their students are being treated as disposable parts of a bureaucratic machine. Many of them believe the entire education profession is on the line. They fear they are in a tug-of-war between the educational community and parental groups that are springing up which want to micromanage some of the things their children are learning.

Then there were the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the significant fallout that has now shown up in historically low standardized testing scores, which were recently reported.

In the most current information I could find on the subject, 85% of teachers surveyed said they went into the profession “to make a difference in children’s lives” beyond the 3 R’s. In fact, more than 99% of the teachers surveyed agreed with the statement: “Teaching is more than academics; it is also about reinforcing good citizenship, resilience and social skills.”

Don’t think this concern is happening only elsewhere; it is a major concern among those in our local schools. The most recent example came earlier this year when Panther Valley district teacher Joseph Steber of Nesquehoning told the school board that a crisis is brewing because of the departure of veteran colleagues who are leaving the profession or going to jobs in other districts which pay more and have more resources. Steber also said that violence is a growing concern in the district.

As a result of this nationwide concern and as the bodies pile up from school shootings - the most recent last month in St. Louis - teachers are fearful for their own safety and say that they don’t always have the backing of administrators and parents when disciplinary issues arise. On top of that, teachers are being challenged about what they can and can’t teach.

As my colleague Jim Zbick noted in a recent column, some states such as Alabama, Florida and Tennessee are now limiting certain topics from being taught or require teachers to let parents and the public know when “controversial” units are scheduled to come up in the curriculum.

The concern about teachers abandoning their jobs is staggering, as noted by the results of a National Education Association survey this year, which showed that 55% of educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than planned.

As Allentown native Lee Iacocca, former president and chairman of the Chrysler Corp. from 1978 to 1992, famously said, “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com