Make me laugh

What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?

You can't use a pitchfork to unload the bowling balls.

I first heard that joke when I was in sixth grade, and, many years later, still laugh at it. Like fine art and wine, good humor withstands the test of time.

I define life by its comedy. Or, more to the point, I define my own life by Groucho Marx's description of humor. Once, someone asked Groucho: What is it that makes something funny? He answered the question with this: If you take a stunt man and dress him up as a little old lady, put him into a wheelchair and roll him down a steep hill into a stone wall Š that's not funny. However, Groucho continued, if you take a real old lady, put her in a wheelchair and roll her down a steep hill into a stone wallŠ that's funny!

And there, perhaps, is the explanation for a life spent in the Clark County School District. A teacher is Groucho's real old lady in the wheelchair. Constantly rolling down steep hills into stone walls. What else could explain all the insanity? All the nonsense? The pain?

The school district has been organized on a pre-Civil War slavemaster model to tyrannize teachers in Las Vegas into permanent economic submission. Consequently, predictions for the next school year indicate the district will come up about 1,000 teachers short. In a free country, in a market economy, in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet, it is becoming impossible to persuade people to slave away in our classrooms for shit wages.

This problem didn't pop up overnight. And it's not going to disappear any time soon.

During the economic boom 10 years ago, when Bill Clinton was still president and Bob Miller governor, local teachers were starting to be left out of the economic equation. While other professions, police officers and county librarians for example, were receiving 4 and 5 percent yearly cost-of-living raises, teachers were beginning a long decade of averaging slightly above 1 percent in annual increases. In 2003, the severity of the public education situation was becoming evident, so state legislators raised taxes and created a huge budget surplus. This was done in the name of education, yet none of the extra revenue has gone to help heal the festering sore of teacher pay in Clark County. In the meantime, the cost of living in Las Vegas was rising roughly 200 percent, in a decade when teacher salaries were increasing only between 14 to 16 percent. Adding insult to this financial injury, teachers also had a 300 percent take-back of their benefits several years ago.

No wonder the Entertainment Capital of the World cannot attract highly qualified teachers. The money sucks. It's that simple.

A confederacy of nitwits has worked hard to create this ongoing problem -- business leaders, politicians, school board members, the school district itself (which negotiates against teachers) and the teachers' union (which consistently has sold teachers down the river). These groups are now feverishly proposing pseudo-solutions that, frankly, will solve nothing at all. Phrases like "merit pay" and "raising beginning teacher salaries" are merely the rhetoric of diversionary tactics to stall for more time.

The fact of the matter is, all teachers here currently are underpaid by $16,000 to $20,000 per year. The average teacher salary in Las Vegas, the costliest city in the state, ranks only 12th out of the 17 school systems in Nevada.

Like Groucho's little old lady in the wheelchair, teachers are crashing into an economic wall. And they are dropping like, well, old ladies hitting stone walls. Hard.

"I don't think I can survive this job more than a few years before I drink myself to death, or end up truly losing it one way or another, or end up steering a shopping cart through Circle Park," one typically depressed school district teacher wrote to me last week.

Another colleague of mine, in his 27th year of teaching in Clark County, recently told me his nephew, in his second year of teaching, is making as much as he is Š in another state where the cost-of-living is comparable to that of Las Vegas.

Ouch. Teachers in Vegas are the dead babies in the pitchfork joke above.

Here's another sick joke:

Question: What do you call a school district that is short 1,000 teachers?

Answer: Totally fucked.

I just made that up. I think it's hilarious. Are you laughing with me?

CHIP MOSHER IS A SIMPLE CLASSROOM TEACHER. HIS SPOKEN-WORD CD AMERICA, PLEASE! CAN BE PURCHASED AT AMAZON.COM.