Unfortunately, many people buy into the idea that if we just “get rid of all the bad teachers,” the poor little kids will suddenly be better served and will excel.
Teachers are only one link in a complex chain. They’re screwed if their admins won’t back them up and if the parents are causing as much trouble as their kids are, yet it’s somehow all their fault if the young’uns don’t get high scores.
I’m just glad to be teaching at the college level. If somebody is acting up or cheats, they get be tossed out of the classroom or even out of the college. If any parents try to butt in–and this does happen sometimes–they are shown the door.
If you want to bring about a 21st Century French revolution in the USA, complete with Reign of Terror, I can think of no better way. The reasons why are highly political and left as an exercise for the reader.
My wife was a teacher for 21 years; she stepped away from it two years ago.
She still loved the actual teaching, but the things that seemed to have gotten worse over her career, and led to her leaving the field, were:
An increase in the attitude among parents that teaching their children was 100% the teacher’s job, and who couldn’t be arsed to participate in anything.
Kids who are lacking basic life / social skills, which one might’ve thought would have been ingrained at home. They don’t have manners, they don’t know how to (or don’t realize that they should) do basic things like clean up after themselves. It’s one thing to have kindergarteners or first-graders who lack these things, but when you have a room full of 10 and 11 year olds who lack in basic socialization, you spend too much of your classroom time working through those things, too.
All the political crap, with the school board, local and state regulations, etc.
I have friends who are teachers. They are earning roughly the same early-career level salary as me, but they are working far more hours, lesson planning into the night, and are subject to a huge range of things outside of their control - kids’ personal issues, curriculum changes, inspections of various kinds, parents’ attitudes. I generally go to work knowing what’s to come. I get my coffee when I want to, work pretty much at my own pace, don’t feel responsible for anyone’s personal problems, report to my boss but don’t have her watching over my shoulder as I type. I’ll work extra hours occasionally and on weekends for a few hours very infrequently. I take annual leave when I want - yeah, I have less time off but I don’t have to do admin when I’m on holiday and I can go abroad when flights and hotels are cheaper.
Frontline workers of all stripes often experience burnout. I think being a social worker is harder - as SciFiSam said, teaching is tiring for the soul, but with social workers you’re seeing far more traumatised kids than not so it’s even worse. I also suspect teaching gets much easier with experience, but I’d still never, ever do it.
Teaching does get easier with experience. In Georgia, at least, whimsical new programs that make you have to change everything you’ve worked to build up every couple of years is the current problem. Oh- there is also a new teacher evaluation program, that if done the way the powers that be would have one do it, is said to take up nearly all a teacher’s free time. I can’t think of another job that has gotten so much more difficult due to absurd paperwork and expectations as teaching has in the last ten years.
Ah, yes–initiative creep. I’m not of the school of thought that says, “If it was good enough for Mimaw, it’s good enough for Junior.” There’s plenty of room for innovation in education. But many folks in educational administration justify their jobs by pushing new programs, new initiatives, new requirements on teachers every year. What they don’t do, of course, is to say which old initiatives/curricula/requirements were dumb and should be scrapped.
If I had my way, I’d start Opportunity Cost Consulting, an educational consulting firm. I’d tell admin that when they were considering any new program, they’d need to add these two questions to their consideration:
How many minutes per week do we expect teachers to spend fulfilling this program’s requirements?
What specific things should teachers stop doing each week to free up those minutes?
And when it isn’t the administration, its the politicians.
This one is sweet - the school is mandated to have so many school days a year. This year we had more than the allowed number of school closings, so we need to make up days to meet the legal requirement. The districts wonderful solution - which tells you how much educating the kids matters - add nine minutes to each school day. Now, MAYBE in elementary school you can do something with nine extra minutes a day (I doubt it), but for my middle schooler, it adds one minute to each class - yeah, I’m sure a lot of education happens in sixty seconds.
I can’t say I’m too disappointed that they aren’t adding days at the end of the year, but this solution is a checkmark on number of educational hours.
Here is an article about a brain surgeon. He talks about how he intended to work for a few more years, but is now planning to retire earlier. Why? Because he was threatened with a disciplinary action for wearing a wristwatch in a hospital area where this wasn’t allowed.
Call him an arrogant prima donna if you want, but I sympathize with him. He feels the policy was heavy handed and applied indiscriminately. Then he points out that in any workplace, or human system, there is a small percentage of people who won’t follow some rules. And if you design a system focused largely on thwarting those people, you end up pissing off the vast majority of the people who are trying to be good workers and act correctly.
That’s why I left teaching after ten years.
You know the expression, “Never push a loyal person to the point where they no longer care”? That was me. The kids were never the problem. It was endless battles over minutia, failure of admin to join battles that mattered, and increasing micromanagement. I understand how a hierarchy works; I didn’t expect to work without supervision. But it reached a point where I had to ask, “I’ve got ten years experience, a master’s degree and I’m a published author in my discipline - at what point will you trust me to do a few things on my own professional judgement”?
Hasn’t always been easier in other fields, but I don’t regret making the change.
Just a quick chime-in regarding purchasing supplies one would think should be acquired by the workplace: not so uncommon. I believe most mechanics supply their own tools, and in my business (tv news) I personally purchase a lot of the significant items that help set me apart in my job field.
Within my close family I am the on non-educator. My dad was a principal, mom a teacher, sister and brother-in-law both teachers. I am proud of all of them and yet I am equally sure I would not have done their jobs nearly as well.
In the end I think I could add the line “In reality it sucks everywhere” to many of the threads in this message board. Teaching is tough, as are so many other jobs, and not everyone is fortunate enough to have their career & dreams match their personalities.
Well in his model schools would be able to kick out any troublemakers, making it easier to work with the kids who actually want to be there. I’ve been in a school where about 5% of the kids were absolutely nothing but a waste of air and who kept others from learning. I wish anything the schools could get rid of these jerks but they cant.
Mechanics take their tools with them as they move from job to job, and a lot of them see it as an initial investment in their own eventual shop. For a teacher, most of the supplies are consumables - paper and glue and pencils. Especially elementary school teachers. And it isn’t just supplies - its hat and mittens for the kid who doesn’t have any for recess. Its food for the kid who never gets lunch and whose parents won’t fill out the free lunch forms. So every year its hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
There ARE lots of jobs that suck. Personally, I can’t imagine being a pediatric oncologist, or a divorce lawyer. The job I never want is washing windows on big buildings (scared of heights, don’t know how anyone does that). But this thread isn’t “who has it as bad as teachers?” Its reasons teachers burn out (and obviously, not all do).
Again I bring up the point that many schools have PTA’s and other funding sources for such incidentals. Plus that money they spend out of pocket is tax deductible.
PTA money is almost never used for the sort of thing people are talking about here, at least not in the school system where my mom taught for 35 years. It’s used to buy things for the school/class in general, usually either durable goods or experiences. Playground equipment, anatomical models for science/health class, educational bulletin board kits, having a speaker or going on a trip, that sort of thing. They don’t have a fund to take care of the kids whose parents buy two notebooks and a box of pencils in August and think that ought to last all year.
Many do. But when I was on the PTA for our school, the PTA funding was inadequate. Some teachers have all the resources they need, they teach in rich districts - that solves a lot of problems (and creates others - one of my teacher friends really prefers working with students whose parents aren’t busy dreaming of Ivy League for their kids). Other teachers don’t. What burns one teacher out (say, not controlling their own lesson plans) might be something another teacher loves (thank god I don’t need to decide every year what they’ll read, someone will tell me and I can put the responsibility of them getting a cohesive education on the district - instead of having them read Of Mice and Men four times). Teachers are individuals and each teaching situation is also unique.
No PTA at my school, and the limit is $250 for the deduction.
I spent much more as an elementary teacher than I did as a middle school teacher because I had so many bulletin boards, and the younger kids seemed to need so much more than the older kids.
The hardest part was the lack of discipline and the lack of support, and I taught in a pretty good school. Two kids got in a fight, and one ofthe male teachers broke it up. One of the parents got upset because her child (one of the fighters) was touched as the teacher broke up the fight. The administration backed the parent.
I went in one parent meeting with the other teachers on my middle school team only to be stopped by the district’s lawyer and be told, “We don’t want to go to court. If one of you has to be bloodied, so be it.”
I had a class where the IEP of one child said he needed a quiet atmosphere and I was to keep all distractions and noise to a minimum, but the IEP of another student said he needed to be able to express himself and get up and walk around at will.
Our Institute Days and early-out days were usually speakers who came in and talked about reading strategies (I didn’t teach reading), state testing, or new district policies. They were rarely work days.
A couple of years ago I went on a website that would tell me what the value of an amount of money from the seventies would be today, and I realized I made about the same as a waitress while I attended college as I did as a person in her fifties with a master’s degree. But I will say I don’t want to go back to waitressing! Although when I left the restaurant I left all thoughts of work behind.
I had some great administrators and wonderful parents, and I miss the kids, but there’s a lot I don’t miss.
Sorry to hear about those bad experiences. I used to be a teacher so I know how you feel.
On top of all that’s been said, some district have another issue - race. Sometimes black, white, or hispanic teachers, parents, and administrators just do not get along. I was working in the Kansas City Missouri district while they were going thru their desegregation mess where you definitely saw this issue come up.
You have research that shows your methods (that aren’t being implemented) are better than those that are? And you also have research that shows that what you are doing now is putting kids in a worse position than those of say, 25 years ago? How have the educational results trended in your district over the last 25 years?
A bigger question, should teachers just be able to do whatever they want in the classroom?