You're Not Welcome, Mr. Kotter

We begin our bi-weekly column with a topic I hold especially dear to my heart: my money. Or, more accurately, my future money. As many of you know, I am a school teacher, and, like most school teachers, I hope to someday retire and never teach school again. While I do have a considerable number of years before I can retire, I nonetheless fantasize about this day quite often.

My plan is to go out on top, in my fifties, some year when no one else is retiring, thus leaving it up to me to soak up the attention. My retirement banquet will be a lavish affair, with finger foods and what not, with former students and colleagues taking turns at the podium, describing my overall greatness. The ceremonies will end with a clever yet inspiring speech by me before a band composed of actual musicians punctuates the evening with a rousing rendition of one of my favorite songs; perhaps the Indiana Jones theme or something from Green Day. Regardless, the night will be lovely. I can hardly wait.

Unfortunately, the State of Illinois is once again trying to ruin my life, raining on my future parade without my consent by threatening to molest my retirement savings. Without this money I will not be able to retire and therefore the aforementioned retirement ceremony, while undoubtedly fun in its own right, will be terribly awkward and perhaps even unethical, depending on whether or not I tell the DJ.

The main reason the state is thinking about ruining my retirement decades before it even begins is because Illinois, while aesthetically pleasant in the autumn, is bad at being a state. Somehow we are broke. As to how a state the size of Illinois, with acres upon acres of farmland, numerous navigable rivers, access to the Great Lakes and one of the largest cities on Earth can be broke defies logic, but I suspect it may be connected to the fact that many of our governors eventually get arrested.

But I digress. Back to my future money problems. As a teacher, my retirement savings plan functions like this: Let’s pretend, for the sake of easy-to-comprehend-round-numbers, my salary is one-thousand dollars a year. The governments—state and federal—take about two hundred out of that and then another hundred goes to TRS—the Teacher’s Retirement System—leaving me with approximately 70% of my salary. The idea behind this is that the state believes it is better at saving for my retirement than I am, and so it pools all this cash together in a giant money cauldron, I guess, earning money on interest and investments, simmering for decades, and then when I retire they will start handing me the money at a fraction of my former salary.

On paper this sounds like a reasonable idea. Because of the earnings all the collective money has garnered, coupled with the fact that some people die, there should be enough money in the pot to finance part of my retirement, at least enough for me to avoid excessive panhandling. The problem, though, is that the money cauldron is a great idea, and, like many wonderful ideas, it has been abused by legislators without good ideas of their own. Since the money cauldron is full and Springfield is broke, Springfield has decided that perhaps they could use my money to fix problems I did not cause nor even entirely understand.

Boo! I say! Boo to this numbskullery! Does anyone have any idea what is going to happen if teachers do not get their money when they retire? Many of them, because they have become accustomed to paying for things instead of stealing them, will not retire, year after year, leaving our school system in the throes of a geriatric nightmare.

Remember when you were in school? Remember the “old teacher” that taught your parents in kindergarten, the one that fell asleep in the middle of the Bunsen burner experiment? How many of our amusing anecdotes about these teachers end with life-affirming tidbits such as “And that old Mr. Tone inspired me to become a heart surgeon the day they wheeled him out of study hall.”

No. No, they end with lines like, “She told us that story seventeen times” or “I don’t even think he knew the cage was open.”

Do you know what happens when you put a sixty-five-year-old in a room full of seventh-graders? People die. Is this the future we want for our grandchildren? A future where they are being taught by us, their grandparents? The answer to these questions, of course, is no. Surely there is a better solution to our state’s economic woes than to force people into situations that will, at the very least, result in someone being set on fire.

I have some ideas about possible solutions, but they must wait for discussion until my next entry in two weeks. After all, if I’m going to be teaching for another thirty-five years, I should probably go take a nap.