"Will you be our teacher?"

It was an odd question for me to hear. I was a student teacher in 1992, and I'd only just walked into this classroom as part of my daylong observation of high school educators. But after watching the grizzled American history teacher for an hour, I saw why the girl had asked me.

He'd been on the job for about 35 years, and, as he told me later, he'd passed up a buyout offer because he was at the top of the union scale, and didn't want to give up his payche...