I don’t live in “this country” (the USA); I am Canadian.
I am also a high school French and English teacher, in a province that doesn’t have a large French-speaking population.
This thread is fairly typical of the back-and-forth that goes on about overpaid teachers with too much holiday time, and the opposite view, “No, we’re not overpaid and we work a LOT, dammit, for the crumbs we’re given.”
To get back to the OP: where is the thread like this one for nurses? For other public employees who are similarly educated? Why is it OK to teacher-bash (and make teachers feel they need to defend themselves), yet no-one takes on the other professions in the same way, and with the same vehemence?
In my province, in order to teach at a public school, a person must have a minimum of 5 years of university education, be a member of the College of Teachers (a professional organization), and be a union member. (Yet we do not have the right to strike, as we have been legislated to be an “essential service”.). At the same time, we must not allow students to be unsupervised (otherwise horrible incidents like the kicking described up-thread may happen). I have five years of university, and I have to wait for the end-of-class bell to pee. By law.
That said, aside from the recurrent bladder infection, the long hours, and the lack of significant amounts of time off (I spent the whole summer preparing to teach Social Studies 9…which, I found out the day after labour day, administration had decided to take out of my course load. I’m teaching a block of French 9 instead. Which I now have to prepare for.) I really love my job. The kids, for the most part, are great; my colleagues (aside the occasional cow-orker) are knowledgeable and sensitive; my school is public but a school of choice–we have some control over who warms the seats.
My complaint, as a teacher, is not about the pay (though it isn’t great, for me…my husband is a transit bus driver with the same number of years of experience as me, and we make the same amount of money, even though he has FOUR WEEKS training that HE WAS PAID TO TAKE), nor about the rantings of people who think we are switched on at 8 am and off at 2:30 like robots, because the preparation, photocopying, unit and lesson planning, marking, report card preparation, coaching, extra help, makeup quizzes, and unit test creation and analysis all are done by magical bunnies, not teachers (though they annoy me). It is about the parents who constantly complain that their snowflake is being marked too hard, or asked to do too much work…and then takes Suzie Snowflake to freaking Disneyland for a month, right before exams.
At my particular school, for my particular students, the current version of this is “going back to India” for a relative’s wedding, for six weeks.
Since the semester is 18 weeks long, NO, I will not accept six weeks’ work all at once. No, I do not know exactly what lesson we will be doing on Tuesday three weeks from now, as my lessons have to adjust to meet the needs of the class, and I am not sure (yet) how much extra time your grade 9 class will need on irregular present-tense verbs. And if your parents complain that I don’t have six weeks’ worth of work to give you, the district has a lovely correspondence program that you could “attend” for this semester. I teach the kids who show up. Your missing 33% of the semester VOLUNTARILY does not make teaching you 100% of the content MY problem.
Also, 20% of your French mark is based on your speaking skill. How much of your time in India are you going to spend speaking French to francophones? What evidence of this will you have to offer me? Right.
If school is so important that parents bitch and whine about their kids performance (and blame teachers when kids fail)…and they do…then WHYINHELL don’t they keep their kids in bloody school?
I have two teenaged daughters. They have NEVER had a family holiday scheduled during the school year (even before I became a teacher, 3 years ago). They have had some mediocre teachers, some awful ones and some awesome ones…whether they learn or not is a TEAM PROJECT: kid, teacher, parent, as parts of an equilateral triangle.
Want scores to go up on Yon American Standardised Tests? Make school a three-way partnership instead of a blame game. Teach kids from the time they can toddle that school is important and to be taken seriously. Make parents partners, involved in their kids’ schooling. And quit fer-cryin’-out-loud blaming teachers for everything that goes wrong with every kid everywhere.
But again, how do you legislate respect?
I have had parents approach me at parent-teacher conferences and say, “You are a wonderful teacher.” They have no experience of me teaching, and have no anecdotal evidence to offer, so my public response is a polite smile and a thank-you, and my private response is an eye-roll and a muttered’ “How the hell would you know?” in the car on the way home. I have had parents ask me when I was going to bump up their kid’s grade: 73% is a B in my province, and he was earning 71%. “Never,” I said. “I have enough education to know that 71 is not equal to 73. I am required to accurately report your son’s marks…and he has a C+.” Both that child’s parents were teachers. I have had parents complain to the principal about me; I have had parents sing him my praises. You can’t legislate respect…but you can earn it.
