Thursday, 8 November 2007
A teachers experience!
Teachers are people too!
By Renee DeCoskey
Little kids (and sometimes big ones) are often under the distinct impression that their teachers live at school. Any minor detail about your personal life, and the students are all over you, dying to know more. They are absolutely fascinated that we are real people. We live in apartments and houses. We drive cars. We sometimes run to the store in sweats, and we shop in the same mall. We are people, too.
The biggest misconception about teachers is that they have it pretty easy: nights and weekends off, holidays are free, and the coveted summer is theirs. All they have to do is go to work during the day and, as many people see it, serve as a glorified babysitter. That's the first problem. Teachers do so much more.
A typical day for me would be as follows: I wake up at 5:15 in the morning. I'm at the school at 7:15, getting things in order for my day. Then the kids come. Each period is 90 minutes, and when you've got an average class size of 28-30 kids, that's a long time. Think of your own children. If you're sometimes happy just to get a moment of silence by getting them out of the house, ask yourself who is dealing with them. When they're going to school, they're coming to me. Except instead of just your child, I've got 27 or so more. This makes classroom management difficult at times, so I've got to be on guard and aware of what's going on. By the end of the period, my voice is tired from yelling over top of them because 30 of them are louder than one of me. Most of the period I spend in front of the class, discussing the material or doing some kind of activity. At any free point I have, I'm either answering emails or working my way through the never-ending stack of grading that threatens to eat my desk. I get 20 minutes for lunch, and then it's back to the grind. Keep in mind that during all of this, I've got students who are giving me attitude, students who won't lesson, behavior problems, and even other adults who seem set on bringing me down. It's emotionally exhausting.
When my day ends at 2:45, it's not really over. I need to prepare for the next day by making copies or changing my boards. I stay and work on grading and lesson plans. Sometimes I have to stay after school so that a student group that I advise can meet. I've passed an 8 hour work day by far - this is time I'm not being paid for.
I might stay an extra hour or two after school, and then it's off to my second job. Oh yes, even though I teach full time and probably easily put in at least 50-60 hours a week, I still need a part time job. The cost of living is high, and as a single person who is supporting myself, I find that I struggle to have even $200 dollars left over each month for myself.
Not only that, but I'm also going to grad school part time, so in addition to commuting time and class time, I've got to make time to complete my own assignments and readings, as well as write papers. I'm doing this not only because I want to, but because knowing my content as best as I can will make me a more effective teacher.
By the time my day is done, I've had maybe 2 hours of it that were actually *my* time, not taken up by teaching, grading, lesson planning, advising, working a second job, doing homework, or attending class.
Oh, and about the summer breaks being free? Not so much. After deciding I would never teach summer school again, I spent the beginning of this summer teaching a pre-colllege workshop for high school students at a local college. I've spent time thinking about how I'm going to revise certain material this year, and now that the summer's half over, I'm thinking about lesson plans for the beginning of the year and gearing up for my professional development courses coming up soon. So yes, I do work over the summer.
My point here is that the next time you set out to criticize a teacher, think about how much they do in a day: we work one of the most important jobs, we work harder than most people, putting in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, and then we have our own things to attend to. We ARE people, too, and it's easy to make mistakes in all of that. Be aware of how hard your children's teachers work, and please respect that.
(Taken from: DeCoskey, R. 2007. Helium : Teachers are people too. [Online] From Helium, Inc. at: http://www.helium.com/tm/460832/little-sometimes-often-under. Last Accessed On: 8th/11/2007)
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
The percieved view of teachers
There is a problem with these images, and the meanings behind them: either you are a superhero, saviour, saint, 100% a teacher or you aren’t a teacher at all.
If you have a life outside of the school or can’t save or help everyone you are automatically a crap teacher, you don’t care about your students and you don’t know what you are teaching them.
Every day we, as a part of society, experience some form of media about teachers, whether through television and cinema or newspapers, personal experience or advertisement. By experiencing teachers in these ways we develop understandings and perceptions of teachers that may not and in many cases are not completely authentic. But what does this mean for teachers? What does it mean when their students think of them in the ‘Harry Potter’ sense, which is that they live in their classroom and have no family, literally married to their school or chained to their desk?
The media which influences many aspects of our daily lives makes it difficult for teachers to actually be effective teachers without worrying about the repercussions. Students begin to expect their teachers to be able to solve the most complex problems, problems like depression, abuse, intellectual difficulties, and racial, religious and cultural differences. Is it the teacher’s responsibility? Should a teacher do anything but teach? Should a teacher be a superhero?
A teacher spends 6 hours a day with their students, not counting extra curricula activities and tutoring. In other words over a quarter of a teacher’s day is spent educating their students, being a mentor, a career, a behaviour manager, a councillor, a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and on top of that a friend. Are we expecting too much of teachers? Perhaps we are, considering they (apparently) only work 9am to 3pm five days a week, and have 12 weeks of holidays a year. Isn’t all that just a little bit too much to expect them to cope with in such little time to do it all in?
I just wanted to ask these questions to get you thinking about what you expect of your teachers, your children’s teachers, or the teachers of the students of the future, of the students who may one day become your doctor, your local chemist, your store owner or the Prime Minister. What does six to ten (plus) hours of your day mean to you? What does $41,000 mean to your family?
If you were expected to spend every minute of your life in your selected profession, if you were asked not to leave at the end of the day, if you couldn’t leave your work AT work and go home and spend time with your family... would you consider yourself a person? Teachers are people too...
Future entries will include the teachers view... and I’ll be asking for your input through comments and the poll to the right of the page.
Your,
Pre-Teach-Er
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