I recently joined a fitness club in Baltimore and was thrilled to learn that there was a $20-a-month membership fee reduction for educators. Then I found out the truth: teachers got the corporate rate.

I have worked as a full-time professor at a small liberal arts college in Maryland for 13 years now. I love my job — the students, the autonomy, campus life, summer breaks and whole semesters off for research and writing. Indeed, I could not imagine a profession better suited to my unconventional interests, not to mention work habits which require discipline, but on one's own schedule.

The salary, of course, is something else. As an associate professor with a Ph.D. from one of the world's most prestigious research universities, I still make under $66,000 a year. But I knew that going into this business and wouldn't switch careers for anything. Moreover, compared to my more impoverished yet exceedingly dedicated colleagues at our nation's primary and secondary schools, academic life looks pretty sweet — with its top-tier students, specialized courses, lighter teaching loads and greater separation from disgruntled parents.

There are plenty of clichés about people who teach for a living and how they are "preparing the future leaders of our nation" and "training the minds of our next generation." Most of them are true, too. Moreover, I do not think that society in general disrespects teachers or that higher salaries are the sole solution to improving the country's educational system. This essay, in other words, is not meant as another lament for something we have long known to be in need of repair, or to suggest that there is a quick fix for our schools in the form of more money for its workers.

What it is about are the less complicated ways that our society might go about showing how it values educators. While students and seniors, regardless of their parents' or personal wealth, get discounts everywhere from movie theaters to hotels, car rental agencies and public transportation, we teachers can rarely, if ever, count on any of this. I might carry a faculty ID card in my wallet, but it's just another piece of plastic anywhere outside my campus. Here in Baltimore, it won't even get me a lower annual rate at the research library at Johns Hopkins University, not to mention uncomplicated access every time I enter the building.

The idea is not radical or complex, nor even very clever. But what if there were financial incentives for teachers that did not rely on state and institutional budgets, but instead were provided by the less direct method of private and public discounts? What if everyone in America knew that there were teacher discounts at the movies and museums, and every time you took the train or renewed your driver's license, just as we all know and easily accept that there are student, senior and veteran discounts everywhere from Disneyland to the local diner? It wouldn't have to be much, perhaps just 10 to 20 percent. Yet what a difference it would make in the pocketbooks of our nation's underpaid educators. Moreover, teacher discounts would speak volumes about how our society esteemed us.

And that's the nub of the notion. We do not offer senior and student discounts because we assume these citizens are poorer than the rest of us. We do so because we value what they have done or are doing with their lives. Senior discounts pay tribute to our older citizens who might want to take in a film or play now that they have more hard-earned time on their hands. And students, despite the widespread and often wrong image of their perpetual state of penury, are really being rewarded for their ambitions, since neither Republicans nor Democrats doubt that staying in school and pursuing a degree is a good thing on both individual and societal levels. As for our veterans, no one from Rush Limbaugh to Jon Stewart would suggest that they were not deserving of society's benefice by way of, for instance, cheaper bus fares.

I don't begrudge my fitness club for offering me its corporate rate. But I cannot say that it makes me feel like they are doing me much of an honor either. As long as Legg Mason employees, for example, are getting the exact same deal through their company, then this particular "teacher discount" feels more like a marketing ploy than any honest effort to put real, monetary value on all those fine phrases about how much we teachers mean to the future of this country.

It will likely be many more years before the recession has lifted enough for educational funding to start rising again. Yet in the meantime there is something we can do now, and with far fewer legislative battles, in order to ease the financial burden on our nation's teachers and demonstrate that our commitment to education in this country is unshaken, least of all by stock market turmoil and mortgage crises. Teacher discounts represent one permanent and meaningful solution to our educational woes. They will not solve all the problems, but they will be immune from the next economic shock and, above all, send a clear message throughout society concerning how highly we really do regard those women and men who, as another trite but true saying goes, have devoted their lives to educating "our most cherished national resource."

Paul Miller teaches modern European history at McDaniel College in Westminster. His e-mail is pmiller@mcdaniel.edu.