Our district is piling more on us. I am only in my second year of teaching. I love the students, love teaching, and even love my team. I am fed up with my district scripting how we teach and giving us a workload that is not best practice for students. The district wants us to work on things that the higher ups think will take 15 minutes a day when in reality it takes 30-45. This is on top of progress monitoring. Budget cuts are coming. I just want to teach! I know that education goes through waves of curriculum, teaching practices, and political movements. For those that have been teaching a long time, will the pendulum swing back to letting teachers teach?
You must be in my district! With reading first expectations, curriculum mapper, progress monitoring, phonics screeners, templates, writing assessments, school goals, behavior problems, out of control parents...do I need to continue, things are getting out of hand! I've been teaching for 12 years and it seems that every year the expectations are getting more intense!
Our district is now looking at having teachers create unit math assessments so that every teacher across the district is using the same test - the math book doesn't do a good job ya know!
I just read in the newspaper that there will be more cuts in education next year in AZ - on top of what we already did this year! Pretty soon we'll all have 40 kids in a class and be expected to have the complete the same things - and the Head of Education wants to add more to our school day and year???????
I won't bore you with the list, but all of the things I've been required to do that always coincides with report card and conference time have overwhelmed me. I'm not a procrastinator and with the exception of my lunch, I'm WORKING to the hilt.
We've added so many new programs in the past three years that I can't even remember them all. And it keeps getting piled on and piled on. Why? Shouldn't they limit it to maybe one new program, like RtI, per year? And provide appropriate training? Why have all of these things, including a new curriculum adoption (with no training) in one year?
Are they going to waive the benchmark tests to allow us to adjust our practices?
No.
Are they going to imbed ANY protected planning time to allow us to complete these tasks, say in the form of releasing us 20 minutes early from the weekly staff meetings?
No.
Something has to give somewhere, and I'm afraid it is going to be teachers... they're going to be the ones thrown under the bus.
Seriously, teachers need to have secretaries nowadays. I don't know what the higher-ups are thinking sometimes.
I know I work all day through all planning/lunch... every possible moment... an work at least 3 hours afterward every single day...as do most other teachers in my school.
Today my team mate was upset because she has had about 1/3 of the parents in her class not show up for conferences. Seriously, do you FORGET to pay bills and get away with it?? Do you FORGET to show up to dr. appointments? At least Doctors get to charge a co payment for not letting them know 24 hrs in advance... what do teachers get when parents dont' show up??? They get to stay even later trying to contact elusive parents and trying to get them to show up. How is this fair? The teacher is held responsible when the parent is irresponsible... how is that fair???
A teacher at my school looked like she would start crying at our last training. She asked how she could teach the required vocabulary at the pacing that the district gave her when the curriculum didn't teach the concept for 4 more months. She was told, "we are not using the pacing schedule anymore". Well, no one told us that! This poor teacher had been running herself ragged for nothing! I feel that there are so many new requirements thrown at us all at once that I don't have time to properly learn and implement anything! When is this going to stop?
It is also my second year in an inner-city school where district administrators feel that its more important to spend time going through huge binders of standard codes to put on our lesson plans (like they dont trust us to be teaching the right thing) than actually planning for our lesson, and to make sure that we have an objective "posted on the board for each lesson at all times" even though we are supposed to be monitoring and adjusting how our lesson goes, so if they come in my room and the objective is: students will write the past participle of a verb, and we happen to be talking about the subject of the verb at that moment because the kids arent understanding subject verb agreement, well then we get a bad evaluation grade. UUUUGGGHHHH!!! I also wonder that same question rubyanne, and the only thing that makes me stick it out is knowing i have a job to support my family, that i am lucky i wasnt laid off due to budget cuts, and that i am one of the lucky ones in the midst of this economic breakdown. Doesnt make the day to day much easier, but that, as well as my kids, is what keeps me from walking out, literally.
It does make me feel a little better that I am not the only one going through this. I have been working 13 hour days the last two weeks just to try to get the minimum of the required stuff done just to read my email and MORE has been added on! I am also pi$$ed that every time I watch the news or open a newspaper I get to hear about the state and parents saying that we don't care about the students because we won't work more days for free!!!
10-27-2009, 05:56 AM
Simple View
