Summer vacation isn’t all that amazing for a lot of teachers. To begin with, it’s not as long as the kid’s. You stay later and arrive earlier to do wrap-up and prep. And often you are working on between. And if your aim is to travel-- well, I hope you like crowds, because you are never going anywhere on low season.
It can be good if you have a real plan for those weeks-- If you are watching your kids or writing a book or something. But my vacations are much better with my current job, where I can bookend personal travel on to work trips.
One solution to that is for a district to be willing to pay what it costs to hire descent subs. They effectively use the kids as hostages here: my son drank a lot of formula because I would only pump at lunch, because of exactly that trade-off. I had to somehow decide if the benefit of an extra 6 ounces of breastmilk a day was worth the damage to one set of kids’ education. It is one of the shittiest things about this job ever, and I am still getting angry just thinking about it.
This was my earlier point. All kinds of jobs look easy if you aren’t the person doing them. I have no idea what it takes to keep an elementary classroom running smoothly, but I am pretty open to the idea that there’s a lot more to it than I noticed when I was a student in one.
For my kids, a lot of the “specials” had been dropped. They had gym and music - which gave the teachers 30 minutes of prep every day. They had a 40 minute lunch/recess - during which time the teachers ate their own lunches - usually over homework. If a kid had to stay in for recess - to catch up on homework or because that was the disciplinary action, they had to supervise the kid in their classroom, cutting their lunch to 20 minutes. But no art - the elementary teachers taught art, and no librarian, so the teachers taught research and helped pick out books for reading.
Now a good point - or bad point on the summer thing is some coaches I know are making 6 figure incomes when the supplement their teaching salaries with all the on-the-side stuff they do by running camps, clinics, and doing private coaching. Most is over the summer but some do it after school.
Quite unfair to the regular teachers I know.
Which frankly if I had my way we would drop all high school sponsored sports. But that’s another topic.
I totally agree with that and I have no problem with districts being more flexible on vacation tims. And again, I’m seeing more of it. Like I mentioned before when his 1rst grade teacher took 2 weeks off to get married and go on her honeymoon.
Provided of course that teacher goes WAY out of her way to leave detailed and thought out lesson plans for the sub and that sub has come in a day early to meet the kids and talk things over with the teacher. Yeah I know it would be pulling teeth to get a school to go along with that but it’s what they need to do.
One issue not being brought up here is the move to year long schooling and 4 day school weeks.
With the year long schooling instead of the long summer break they get longer breaks between quarters. With 4 day weeks the school day is longer but fridays are off.
Now I’ve also seen where they might have a 1/2 day every week like on a wednesday and teachers can have that as work time.
IF the district can even find subs at all. My wife worked at one school from hell where subs refused to work and when a teacher was gone they would just put the kids in other teachers classrooms. Oh, that was great for a 2nd grade teacher to also have to supervise 4-5 3rd graders.
Yeah having quality subs and working with them to make sure they are an integral part of the learning process is something schools need to learn.
The smart schools have gone to having full time or building subs where the subs get regular teaching salaries and work in a specific building so they get to know the kids and teachers quite well.
Then (and not to take anything away from those types of people) they don’t get to complain that they have to spend out of their own pockets for supplies.
It’s no secret that teachers DO that, surely nobody finishs their Ed degree and is shocked when they walk in to their classroom and see that they may have to do that.
Might as well just factor that in to considering the job offer: “Well, it pays 40k, but I’ll spend 1k on supplies this year, so it’s really 39k.”
Totally depends on where you live; around here teachers are generally paid pretty well.
But it’s true that some school don’t have the tax base to support higher teacher pay.
The community (via their school boards/district/etc) doesn’t have money to pony up for school supplies for the kids but the teachers are expected to buy out of pocket because the kids are so important?
The kids can’t be that important to the community if they think funding of a portion of their education should be left to voluntary contributions by their teachers.
CAN the teachers do their jobs with the materials supplied by the school? Sure, maybe they won’t be able to do it exactly how they want to, but can they teach the material?
If they have no suplies with which to teach, then that’s the school’s problem. If the the teacher feels that they are inadequately supplied to teach the material as they see fit, it’s the teacher’s problem.
The difference is that if my job doesn’t give me the tools I need to succeed-- well, it’s literally their loss. I don’t feel too bad about it. I do what they pay me to do, and that’s that.
When teaching, it’s the kids who are let down, and they don’t deserve that.
That’s another thing I don’t miss. The guilt. I love being able to call in sick, not bring work home with me, have an off day, etc. without feeling like a horrible person. In teaching, you can ALWAYS improve your student by investing more time in your job, and it’s tough to draw the line. You can spend hours planning amazing lessons, and it’s awesome. But you can’t spend 8 hours a day planning forever. Unfortunately, then when you don’t, you feel terribly guilty. You can never really say “well I did my best” and tend to the rat of your life.
They do? I taught for years (in public K12), worked in admin and consulting for districts and work in higher ed (with teachers!) and they don’t seem any different than other college educated professionals I’ve come across.
I’m not disagreeing with your overall gist, but you’re extrapolating your own feelings to others. There are a ton of teachers out there who don’t feel guilty and don’t worry about not doing enough–and not all of them are crappy. They just have to be someone who has a healthy, realistic sense of their personal boundaries and duties.
It’s the people who get too emotionally invested who don’t last.
Two stories illustrate some of the frustrations I have with my job. I’ll put them in quoteboxes in case you wanna skip them; I’m nice like that.
Okay, explanations.
When I became a teacher, I was motivated in part by my desire to be in a creative profession, in which I’d analyze problems and come up with solutions. In this case, the problem is that students don’t know what they should know; the solution is to create lesson plans that engage students and along the way help them develop the skills, concepts, and knowledge base they need to gain. I want to do this, and I want to be accountable for doing this (with the understanding that not everything is in my control). I think I’m very good at this; on the strength of my skills in this area, I’ve been awarded grants, scholarships, and National Board Certification.
When I’m able to teach this way, I’m passionate about my job. I’m a chef.
Increasingly, however, the buzzword among ed administrators is not accountability, it’s fidelity. They want to see that teachers are faithful to the curriculum, to the granularity of following daily curriculum guides. Have my students generally mastered fractions-on-number-lines and are bored with another day of practice? Too bad: day 132 of the school year is to be spent on another day of practice. Are my students totally bewildered by where to place 5/4 on a 0-2 number line, and they could really use another day of practice on this skill? Too bad: day 133 of the school year is to be spent on a different skill.
I’m not interested in being the equivalent of a line-order cook. I don’t want to follow someone else’s directions with fidelity, no matter the appropriateness of those directions to my students. It’s really dreary for me, and far more importantly, I think it does a massive disservice to my students.
This is frustration#1: I’m trained to be, and qualify to be, a chef, but I’m required to be a line-order cook. In my opinion, we need to work to make sure all teachers are chefs and then treat them as such.
The drunk under the streetlight store is, of course, about testing. I’m required to teach common core standards in reading literature and reading informational text and writing and language mechanics and math and social studies and science and speaking and listening skills and health standards and technology standards and a handful of others. Some of these skills are “under the streetlight,” so to speak: they’re easy to design tests for.
So my schedule is set: 90 minutes of reading each day, 60 minutes of math, 20 minutes of word work, 20 minutes of read-aloud, 30 minutes of intervention (this is where I get to be creative, coming up with units that address specific student needs; it’s the part of the day I live for). And then there’s the 30-40 minute block every day for writing AND science AND social studies AND health AND technology skills AND everything else.
Why are writing, science, etc. relegated to such a small section of the student day? Simple: they’re not tested. They’re still vitally important for students, but for an administration judged on test results, they’re not as important.
Even within reading, certain skills are testable and therefore more important. Sure, it’s an important skill to be able to read a question carefully and figure out the key words in the question and find specific evidence in a text that answers the question and verify that you’ve answered the question. But the amount of time spent in teaching this skill is, I think, far in excess to its importance relative to skills such as being able to formulate a research question, choose appropriate texts for conducting the research, taking notes, and synthesizing the notes into a written product. We spend so much time teaching the first skill because it’s so easy to test, so it’s tested, so we teach it.
But do those things make the job hard or just sometimes frustrating? I have to admit, those frustrations seem (to me) pretty minor in the grand scheme of ‘work’ and work life. Unless you work for yourself, you generally don’t just get to do whatever you want to do at work (even if you are right). I have found (not saying this is you) that some teachers who are in the field for a long time (and with many of them having never done anything but teach) lose perspective and take things very personally.
They dont at my sons district. The teachers all get something, I think $200 a year they can use to order supplies from the district. Then the PTA gives each $200 to order whatever they want plus if they need any emergency money they just have to ask and the PTA can provide it.
That’s another issue - PTA. It helps if your school has a one.
Do your schools have PTA?
PS. Teachers also get to write off those personal expenses on their taxes.
I’ve worked other jobs–admin positions in nonprofits and academia, mostly, but also worked my way through college doing foodservice. The frustration of being a teacher far outweigh the frustrations I encountered in other fields (with one notable exception when I subcontracted for IBM).
I don’t say that teaching is the worst job, or that somehow our work frustrations are worse than any others, or anything like that. I do think, however, that the frustrations I describe above are important because they negatively impact student learning. It’s not that I take them personally: it’s that I’m passionate about education, and I get frustrated when things hurt our educational system.
If I thought that “fidelity to curriculum” was good for students, I’d quietly watch my soul wither and die, figuring that soul-crushing despair is one of the perks of modern capitalism. But it’s not good for students. And one avenue for protesting it is to make sure that parents and the electorate are aware of the issue and can consider it when making educational choices.