I’ve just finished my latest read, Alexandra Robbins’ The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession. With a subtitle like that you know it’s got to be good, right? And just look at those celebrity blurbs on the back!

This is the problem with teachers. Er, The Teachers. I thought it was good… until I read it. Think every blurb writer read this piece of garbage?

Let’s hope not.

Teachers begins with the premise that the titular profession is under attack, and so are the players themselves. Sometimes literally.

Ms. Robbins intends to show this. And she does. No doubt with some hard-hitting research, like doing a Google search of “sensational news stories about teachers.”

Brilliant.

Actually, there’s a great lesson here. English class lesson. Vocab word: self-fulfilling prophecy. I want to prove a certain thing, so I will open one eye and find examples to fit my hypothesis. And after I’ve found enough news articles, I go out and make a few of my own, going “undercover” with my biases in mind. It’s the teacher equivalent of Nickel and Dimed.

Want to make teaching look hard and its brethren suffering? Take the most wild examples you can find from the news and cobble them together under a fancy book jacket. Use some tearjerker anecdotes to string the narrative along and you’ve got a bestseller.

It is worth noting that many of the tearjerker anecdotes involve teachers being “underpaid,” or some similar description. Potential remedies for such include things like, well, finding money on trees I guess. To those who’ve taken Econ 101, that’s just as laughable as “underpaid.” Nobody’s underpaid for a job with a voluntary contract. Are we drafting teachers these days like conscripts of ancient wars? Public school teacher is not a gig one accepts under duress. Like every government job, there’s a line out the door with people clamoring for it.

So yeah, read Alexandra Robbins’ The Teachers if you’re looking for a little escapism or to pat yourself on the back a bit more because you gave 50 bucks to some charitable cause at your kids’ school.

Be nice to your kids’ teachers, sure. But it’s not anything to write a book about.