Regarding the administrative BS that plagues teaching (as it does in any profession), here is my favorite example:
The last year I was teaching elementary, some District Office Guru realized we needed to be teaching an hour of ELD every day since we had such a large population of language learners. Our district was actually in violation by not having that instruction part of the regular teaching day. Rather than integrating it into language arts (as it is done now with state-approved curriculum designed for that very purpose), we were brought a separate curriculum and told to cut an hour of other daily instruction in order to squeeze this in. This District Guru–who obviously had not seen the inside of a classroom in a long, long time–had actually created a sample schedule explaining how doable this was. That schedule looked something like this:
8:00-10:40 Reading/Spelling/Language Arts/Writing
10:40-11:00 Recess
11:00-12:30 Math
12:30-1:15 Lunch
1:15-2:15 ELD
2:15-2:40 PE/Art/Music/Science/Social Studies
That’s right. Twenty-five minutes each day for five subjects. This was no typo–District Guru actually read over the schedule with us, and read that part of the schedule with a straight face. She had obviously lost her professional mind–but worse, she (as a District Guru) expected us to Do As She Said.
A more minor, but more typical, example:
One principal demanded we all had our daily lesson objectives and standards on the white board. Whatever, I can play, even though I find the practice redundant to my instruction (and the text, which has the objectives and standards written into every lesson). Objectives typically read like this: “All students will add positive and negative integers.” This principal then pulled me aside and made a point that objectives need to start with a verb, and that the “students” part is implied and should be left out. What? What the…oh, fine, whatever, leave me alone. My objective read “Add and subtract positive and negative integers” and the like for the next few years–until we got a new principal. He walked in randomly to observe, and pulled me aside later saying all was great except my objectives need a specific audience: I must start with “All students will…” You have to be kidding. I felt like I was messing up the cover sheet to my TPS reports.
But, all that said, this past Back to School Nimght reminded me why I love, love what I do.
I gave my presentation, and toward the end, noticed a former student (it’s been at least 8 years since she left my classroom) in the audience. I later realized–she had no sibling in my class this year. She just wanted to hang out with me while her parents went to her younger sister’s presentation (in another grade and another class). She came up to me after, just talking about her life. With her was a familiar face–a girl who had been a very troubled 8th grader when I had her (in the class from hell) six years ago. She talked about how she still had the poem I’d given that class for Christmas on her wall, and how much she’d liked having me. That class nearly broke me–it was full of some of the worst of the worst kids our school had–but I refused to quit on them the way they assumed I would. I had an amazing talk with this girl, and realized how as awful as that had been, I had, indeed, made an impact on at least one of those kiddos. She talked about other students from that class who, stunningly, apparently also remember me and talk about me. I was floored, nearly to the point of tears.
As the evening progressed, other adult former students–some I hadn’t seen in a decade, gulp!–came by and visited and hugged me. I was proud to see some were in college; the first in their families ever to go. It was a trip seeing them all “grown up,” and it was just amazing to see how all that energy I pour into my classroom every year does indeed make a long-term difference, at least with some.
It’s an amazing, exhausting, soul-sucking job that tends to be criticized more than praised…but there is no way I would do anything else. I love what I do. I love what I do.