It is not an easy job, and while your pity and words of comfort and back pats are appreciated, educators and kids need your NO vote on Amendment 3, in Missouri, next week. Teaching is not like other jobs. We do not work in factories, and your children are not products on an assembly line. We absolutely must keep local control in Missouri schools.
This is the state of American education. When one makes a statement, a joke, or an observation about inadequate teacher pay, one does not fully understand the gravity of the professional conundrum in which teachers and administrators find themselves. Teachers, principals, superintendents, and members of school boards across the land are constantly refilling their empty quivers and re-acquiring a bead on multiple moving targets: assessments, standards, evaluations, research, best practices, data collection, interventions, and much more. What is true and what is expected can change in an instant. Experience means very little when everything is in constant flux. By process, this is the current state of education in the United States.
It is not an easy job, and while your pity and words of comfort and back pats are appreciated, educators and kids need your NO vote on Amendment 3, in Missouri, next week. Teaching is not like other jobs. We do not work in factories, and your children are not products on an assembly line. We absolutely must keep local control in Missouri schools. Four-day weekend? Maybe that's true for the students, but teachers often have to work for the time off. Teachers may be required to work two twelve-hour days in trade for a day "off", neglecting their own families, and coming home too exhausted to interact.
Teachers are often still in "school" on a day "off", sitting in meetings and "professional development" that may or may not be applicable to their jobs. Before one thinks teachers have extra vacation days through the school year, one should consider that there may be more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye. For folks who haven't noticed, please allow me to point out something: for most jobs/careers, when a worker "takes" a day for sick leave, they do not have to make a plan for a replacement worker. I understand that some do, and in that case, they share something with educators.
As a teacher, I have never expected a substitute to teach what I would. It may take a teacher an extra hour (more or less), outside of the school day, to plan for his/her day off. At times, this is done while pressing through a restrictive illness or bereavement of a loved one. It accompanies the guilty feeling that the teacher is abandoning a classroom full of students who need him/her. It is done with the understanding that a substitute may not be available, students may be distributed into other classrooms, and the plans may be of no use after all. And the day off may actually be spent, not only recovering, but also in planning, grading, or studying data and educational research. When administrators, legislators, students, parents, peers, patrons, or passersby think teachers are lazy or avoid work, they are mistaken. For anyone who might be keeping track, it takes an intermediate teacher two to three hours to grade a single, simple writing assignment for a full class of students. With at least 10 assignments during the year, that calculates to around 30 hours outside of the school day. Just in the grading of writings - not counting other writing assignments and other subjects - teachers add three to four days worth of work to the school year.
For those of you who are keeping track, it takes between six and eight hours for a teacher to prepare quarterly report cards, these days, if s/he is attempting to do everything correctly. The technology used in the process has made things so much easier for us. When I started teaching, 25 years ago, we had to average all the grades using a calculator and record the grades using a pencil. Back in those days, a couple of hours would take care of it.
These are just some of the added hours, outside of the school day, at the same time our insurance rates have out-increased our pay raises, the federal government has been more and more restrictive increasingly less tolerant of teachers who think creatively, and rich guys buy their uneducated beliefs onto the ballots in an attempt to require even more costly and more restrictive assessments on public education. |
AuthorD. Ed. Hoggatt is an award-winning fourth grade teacher. Click Titles to Order Now
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July 2017
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