Teachers, what is least fav part of your job?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The testing. OMG. It's endless.

+Too many

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To 20:44
The email address is often not checked.
In some cases, the student will have set it up for the parent. Who knows, maybe the student has access to the account and controls which email messages are kept for their caregiver to read. Language barriers too.

Yes, I have a student who corresponds as his father. Except he sounds just like himself in the notes. Hilarious. I asked him to stop doing that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe I'll get flamed for this, but grading. 120 students or so (which is low end at the HS level) means thousands of grades each quarter. It takes a long time. There is just not enough time and it is even worse with the constant regrading of items that were submitted well past the due date. And then the "I just submitted this. Will you grade it?" from students. It never ends and it is exhausting.

Regrading should not be a thing. Bring back grades on paper that don’t have to be put in a computer, grade books are much easier. It used to be the student’s responsibility to track their own grades until report cards. Teachers entered one grade at end of each grading period, the end. So much time wasted on just grading, absolutely ridiculous!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What aspect of your job do you find least favorable and how do you try to overcome it? What has worked?

Thank you for asking.

1) Working 65 hours a week (70 hours a week when grades are due) in order to plan, teach, administer, attend multiple meetings, attend trainings, test, grade, substitute teach for colleagues, etc.

2) Enduring gaslighting bullying from an assistant principal.

3) Not being able to obtain services for students who truly need it.

4) Getting 5 hours of sleep per night.

Here is how I overcame it: I quit.

I’ll be following you out the door. I worked from 6:30-4:30 today, and again from 7-9:30. I’m nowhere near ready for tomorrow because I didn’t finish the colossal stack of grading I wanted to return. I’m waking up at 4 to see if I can get it done in time. I absolutely hate the hours. I feel I’m always at work or thinking about work. I hate the workload so much.

[Anonymous]

Working long hours for low pay comparable to my friends and relatives who also have Master’s degrees and work long hours. The emotional investment (I love my students so much but I take their problems home w me too and it weighs on me significantly outside of school.) administrators who make bad decisions and have been out of the classroom too long (or were never in the classroom to begin w) to fully understand the issues teachers face.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Working long hours for low pay comparable to my friends and relatives who also have Master’s degrees and work long hours. The emotional investment (I love my students so much but I take their problems home w me too and it weighs on me significantly outside of school.) administrators who make bad decisions and have been out of the classroom too long (or were never in the classroom to begin w) to fully understand the issues teachers face.

Re: administrators who have been out of the classroom too long

I wonder how many of these problems could be resolved if administrators taught just one class. Teachers continually grow more experienced while administrators’ experience goes stagnant. Those who evaluate us haven’t actually dealt with the new problems we deal with in 2024. If they still taught, how much would that change policies and decision making?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What aspect of your job do you find least favorable and how do you try to overcome it? What has worked?

Thank you for asking.

1) Working 65 hours a week (70 hours a week when grades are due) in order to plan, teach, administer, attend multiple meetings, attend trainings, test, grade, substitute teach for colleagues, etc.

2) Enduring gaslighting bullying from an assistant principal.

3) Not being able to obtain services for students who truly need it.

4) Getting 5 hours of sleep per night.

Here is how I overcame it: I quit.

I’ll be following you out the door. I worked from 6:30-4:30 today, and again from 7-9:30. I’m nowhere near ready for tomorrow because I didn’t finish the colossal stack of grading I wanted to return. I’m waking up at 4 to see if I can get it done in time. I absolutely hate the hours. I feel I’m always at work or thinking about work. I hate the workload so much.

You have my sympathies. Get out as soon as you can. None of these people will be at your funeral but they are putting you into an early grave with a crushing workload. Teachers are making less than $20 per hour when you factor In the actual time it takes to get it al done. I don't miss it at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:BS tasks like completing staff surveys that I know admin and Central Office won’t listen to. This week, we were asked to write a reflection response to the principal’s reflection on some student voice data. I would be fine if we were asked to reflect on the student voice data or even just assigned to read through it. However, instead, we are told what our principal thinks (she found it embarrassing and it hurt her) and how do you respond to that?

Ha! This sounds like some BS the principal at SLES would do.

[Anonymous]

The steady decline in student skills, capabilities, and interest since 2012 arrival of the smart phone.

I taught middle school for 8 years and this is my 9th year in High School. I periodically will go back to successful activities or projects I did with 6th graders at a low performing middle school 15 years ago and realize that my current 11th grade Honors level students wouldn’t be able to do those projects at all. They have no creativity, limited vocabulary, think they have to Google everything, yet can’t formulate decent search phrases to get real information, can’t recognize the low quality of the information they do find, have no critical thinking skills, and yet are sure they are brilliant and expect an A for everything. It’s completely disheartening and dismaying.

Connecting with kids, seeing lightbulb moments, knowing you’ve made a difference in the outcomes for a student is what makes putting up with long hours and ridiculous demands worth it. Without that … many of us are counting the days to retirement.

[Anonymous]

It’s impossible to teach anyone anything because they don’t have basic skills, everything has been dumbed down to make the bottom tier seem not so bottom tier.

[Anonymous]

Sudents who turn in assignments written AI. Student received a zero.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The steady decline in student skills, capabilities, and interest since 2012 arrival of the smart phone.

I taught middle school for 8 years and this is my 9th year in High School. I periodically will go back to successful activities or projects I did with 6th graders at a low performing middle school 15 years ago and realize that my current 11th grade Honors level students wouldn’t be able to do those projects at all. They have no creativity, limited vocabulary, think they have to Google everything, yet can’t formulate decent search phrases to get real information, can’t recognize the low quality of the information they do find, have no critical thinking skills, and yet are sure they are brilliant and expect an A for everything. It’s completely disheartening and dismaying.

Connecting with kids, seeing lightbulb moments, knowing you’ve made a difference in the outcomes for a student is what makes putting up with long hours and ridiculous demands worth it. Without that … many of us are counting the days to retirement.

It's nice you can connect with some. I feel like I teach zombies. But they don't try to eat my brain. That's a plus.

[Anonymous]

The parents of a special ed kid who are in denial there's a significant issue. They know their kid, who's 3+ grades behind in reading, will catch up this year with more supports and individualized attention. But don't pull the kid out of any regular classes or modify the curriculum for them in any individualized way. Just get the kid caught up while doing all the same grade level reading everyone else is doing. (Where's that "pulling hair out" emoji?)

And the parents spend more than two hours a week on the phone with us.

Fortunately the kid's great.

[Anonymous]

I quit teaching years ago but volunteer with kids now. It is mind numbing how many cannot look away from smartphones for more than two minutes and lack any skills with writing or taking initiative to figure out something on their own without being told how to do it.

[Anonymous]

Screens.

Kindergartners on screens. Students on chromebooks allll day. Then they go home and spend time on their tablets.

Attention span is completely gone. Parents don’t care and don’t want to parent.