Why does my kid's school have SO MANY 'professional days'?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers: please stop telling everyone to just become a teacher without training. It devalues your profession.

—a former teacher

As someone with formal training, I think we all recognize that the formal training is useless, except for maybe the first few grades or those teaching self-contained classes. Pretty much any reasonably intelligent person could do it.

BURRRNNNNN

So true though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Am I missing something? The detailed description of a (less than 8-hour day...) does not explain why teachers needs a whole day—20% of their work time—to be planning when that wasn’t the case before. Is this because planning was done during specials before? Because my kid didn’t spend 1/5 of his week in specials last year. I’m genuinely trying to understand.

This teacher gave you an hourly accounting of a typical Wednesday so it actually DOES explain why a whole day is useful. Those of us in person have no planning time 4 days per week. Nobody thinks we actually need a full day of no instruction. But, news flash, TEACHERS DID NOT come up with that plan!!!!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Dear teacher: Really try not to listen to these mofos. It's not worth your time.

+1

These are angry bitter women who didn’t get there way so they act like mean girls on line.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dear teacher: Really try not to listen to these mofos. It's not worth your time.

+1

These are angry bitter women who didn’t get there way so they act like mean girls on line.

Wow, I hope you’re not a teacher...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dear teacher: Really try not to listen to these mofos. It's not worth your time.

+1

These are angry bitter women who didn’t get there way so they act like mean girls on line.

Wow, I hope you’re not a teacher...

Why?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here. I don't have much hope that the parents on this thread who want to micromanage teachers will actually take the information said here but it can never be stressed enough:

Just because you went to school once, doesn't mean you have any idea what it's like to be a teacher.

Even I, having minored in education and then gotten a master's degree in teaching did not get a real glimpse of what it's like until I student taught. And that's exactly what it was: a glimpse.

First of all, if any of your children's teachers are in their 1st through 4th year teaching, they require a WHOLE LOT MORE planning time than teachers in their 5+ year of teaching.

The things that happen in class don't just magically appear. https://www.engageny.org/file/18286/download/math-g4-m5-topic-a-lesson-3.pdf?token=rV04wBqs / Here is a typical math lesson of a typical lesson from Eureka that teachers are expected to have read and planned from. How long does that take to read?

Okay, so that's just math class and we haven't actually prepared any materials yet. Also, this is just the lesson. Before this lesson, we were supposed to have read the whole module outline and know where the unit is going. Preferably, we were supposed to have also looked at the end of unit assessment to ensure that we will cover our bases by the time we actually teach.

Now, we're in online learning where content doesn't just appear at students' work surface. Somehow, these lessons are presented -- power point? Canvas? word document? Something to download and send or edit? That takes time to prepare. Most teachers are not computer programmers and Canvas is possibly the least user friendly piece of software ever invented. If teachers are trying a new program, you have to build in some time to figure out how it works, see that it fails, maybe e-mail someone downtown who can maybe help with the issue, maybe not?

Okay, so now we actually get to teaching it. (The least time consuming piece of our work, frankly).

Then we have to grade the things that students completed. (2nd least time consuming thing).

Now we have to take the grades that kids got on the assignment and put it into the online grading system. Aspen is probably the 2nd least user friendly piece of software ever invented and a lot of times grades need to be transferred one-by-one. Take, for example, First in Math. A program we often use in math class through clever.com. The names in Aspen are in alphabetical order by last name. The names in First in Math are alphabetical by FIRST NAME. There is no way to reorganize either list so that they match. So teachers can download the report into excel, make an extra column for last names and sort (if they're technically proficient). Or maybe they go back and forth between the 2 screens putting in students' grades 1-by-1 from First in Math to Aspen. Either way, another time suck. This happens across most platforms.

We have grade-level meetings, department level meetings, committee meetings, special events (monthly celebrations?), advisory groups and ALSO corresponding with parents.

My typical Wednesday looks like this:
8:15-8:30am Whole School meeting
8:30-9:30am Grade level meeting
9:30am-12pm tutoring / office hours for students at risk of failing while also simultaneously trying to grade and update grades.
12-12:30pm supposedly lunch (interesting that pp adding up hours doesn't include any time for teachers to eat. Probably accurate as mostly I don't end up eating).
12:30-2:30pm Department level meeting
2:30-4pm planning.


Parents that question how teachers spend our time should apply for the many openings that are available next year.

^^this person is claiming her job is hard in part by describing the difficulty of creating a column in Excel for sorting. This is described as something that requires "technical proficiency."

She didn't say hard she said time consuming. Its not that she can't do it its that it takes time to do it and its not just a drag and drop. So while she is doing this annoying task she can't email you; do one on one with your precious child.

I don't know you haven't moved to FL yet already.

it is a task that any normal adult should be able to accomplish in under 2 minutes, so it leaves the rest of this list as suspect.

PP here. This comment is so rude in so many ways.

When you say "any normal adult should be able to accomplish this" to a teacher that does this for a living, you are implying that I am less than capable.

It's ignorant types of comments teachers get all the time. People with no moral compass hee hee haw hawing "If you can, do. If you can't...TEACH! HEE HEE haw haw..." It's not new. It's washed up and sad.

I wish you could contribute more to the conversation than anger and indignation. I, probably unlike you, maintain grades for for a living. So I challenge that anyone would be more efficient at doing my job regardless of their normal status in your eyes. I guess you could, if you already had the document in front of you and all the names in front of you, type the names in and click sort in under 2 minutes. Where do you think the report comes from? Do you think I can just go to a website and click log in ann the report appears in front of my face? No. I'm telling you you actually have no idea what you're talking about and you're saying I'm not to be trusted when I actually do this for a living and you're backseat driving.

If the rest of the list is inaccurate in any way, it's actually because I have no captured the totality of the tasks teachers are responsible for on a day-to-day basis.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am just a subpar human with subpar intelligence who had no other choice but to become a teacher and harm children for a living and lie on anonymous forums to try to stick up for other horrible stupid people that make up the rest of the teaching community. If that's the case, I hope that I can some day get to be as good at my job as the anonymous DCUM keyboard warriors out here.

Haaaahahahahaha I have been a teacher for 8 years. The level of technological incompetence was embarrassingly high. I AM implying that you are less than capable if it takes you more than two minutes to create a new column to filter by in Excel. Maybe the first time it could have taken 10 minutes, but not after that.

Like, do you think that is the "complicated" stuff people are running in Excel? That's 101 level.

Don't worry. Someday you could learn the most basic Excel functions if you really put your mind to it.

Creating a column might take only a moment, but you are leaving out the mass inefficiency that is putting information into aspen. While you can sort the columns any way that you want, you still have to input each grade individually for each assignment, for each student. There is no way to input a spreadsheet into aspen and have the grades auto populate. For me (a different teacher), I sort the data, then have a split-screen so that I have the data on one side and aspen on the other. As you input grades, the whole screen sometimes shifts (never been able to figure out why or how to stop it), so after inputting about 15 grades, you have to refresh the screen and then keep going. Sure, creating and sorting a spreadsheet takes just a minute or two, but if that's all it was then there would not be any grades in aspen for students to see.

[Anonymous]

Excel is not difficult, please stop with the lame jokes. And I. 25, anything I can’t figure out has a whole YouTube tutorial on it.
And teaching has varying degrees of difficulty. Your little NW kids are easy peasy. Talk to me when you can teach at a title 1 self contained class or even a gen ed one.