College pennants hang from every open space in Chuck Hennessee’s classroom at Culbreth Middle School in Chapel Hill. He’s even strung some up on clotheslines from one side of the room to the other, so you have to duck to avoid them. But for Hennessee, it’s been a few years since his own graduation. “I am a better teacher in my 29 th year now than I was in my 25 th and much better than I was in my 20 th , my tenth, and it doesn’t even compare to my fifth and first year,” says Hennessee. For many of those years as a teacher in Wake, Durham, and now Chapel Hill, Hennessee has supplemented his income by working as a bus driver, a furniture salesman, even as a bartender. Now, as he closes in on 30 years as a teacher, he has a base salary of $50,000, not counting the local supplement, the stipend he gets for coaching volleyball, and master’s pay. This year, he got a 0.3 percent raise from the state, the lowest possible on the new teacher salary schedule. “It is not even with the cost of