Teachers, what surprised you most about the profession?

[Anonymous]

I am a teacher who is a career switcher. I’ve now been teaching for four years. What has surprised me most about the teaching profession is the obscene amount of hours that goes into it. Yes, I had heard teachers complain about their workloads before deciding to become a teacher, but in all honesty, I thought they were exaggerating. If you are a teacher, what is it about teaching that was the biggest surprise for you?

[Anonymous]

How draining it is. Physically and mentally. I block out how awful the beginning of the year is. It is very overwhelming and it really doesn't get better the longer you do it. They just keep dumping more and more on our plates. I won't be able to do my normal end of the year paperwork this year so that will be one more huge pile waiting for me come August/September.

[Anonymous]

I guess how little respect we get as professionals...also parents!! So many parents think they know better than we do, and try to tell us how to do our jobs. Hopefully distance learning has been an eye opener for them, but DCUM makes me question that.
Also how people expect us to be working 24/7. I have parents who call me at any hour and even on the weekends. I have a life too!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess how little respect we get as professionals...also parents!! So many parents think they know better than we do, and try to tell us how to do our jobs. Hopefully distance learning has been an eye opener for them, but DCUM makes me question that.
Also how people expect us to be working 24/7. I have parents who call me at any hour and even on the weekends. I have a life too!

+1000

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How draining it is. Physically and mentally. I block out how awful the beginning of the year is. It is very overwhelming and it really doesn't get better the longer you do it. They just keep dumping more and more on our plates. I won't be able to do my normal end of the year paperwork this year so that will be one more huge pile waiting for me come August/September.

This worries me. Do you find that as you get your lesson plans established things get easier? What worries me is that admin can switch you to another grade anytime they want and it's like starting out at ground zero again. Does it become considerably less time consuming if you get to stay at the same grade/subject for a number of years?

[Anonymous]

I've been teaching more than half my life now. What is surprising to me is the severity of behaviors that are allowed to occur in classrooms. Kids who display dangerous behaviors, over and over, and teachers are just expected to deal with it. There are no TA's available or given to help without a special education diagnosis and that can literally take years, unless the parent pushes for it.

It is also shocking to me that schools drag their feet in evaluating for special education. Even when I as a teacher have triple the amount of documentation of interventions and data that is typically required.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess how little respect we get as professionals...also parents!! So many parents think they know better than we do, and try to tell us how to do our jobs. Hopefully distance learning has been an eye opener for them, but DCUM makes me question that.
Also how people expect us to be working 24/7. I have parents who call me at any hour and even on the weekends. I have a life too!

+1000

+2000

I will say that off DCUM, people seem much more aware now of how hard teachers work and that teaching isn’t something that just anyone can do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How draining it is. Physically and mentally. I block out how awful the beginning of the year is. It is very overwhelming and it really doesn't get better the longer you do it. They just keep dumping more and more on our plates. I won't be able to do my normal end of the year paperwork this year so that will be one more huge pile waiting for me come August/September.

This. But for me it was manageable until I had my own child. Before I had a child I could go home and decompress and not have to talk to anybody for a few hours since DH started and ended work later than I did. I could go on a walk to clear my head or just sit on the couch and veg.

After I had my son I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to be in “mom mode” all day and night long. There was never a break from being “on”. I like kids (of course), but I really found it difficult to be around and be responsible for kids every minute of every day. I find that I use up all my patience on my students during the school day and don’t have much left for my own family, which leads to a lot of feelings of guilt. Compounded with the other stresses of the job, like more and more being added to our plates with nothing being taken off, it’s a lot.

[Anonymous]

I have taught for over 20 years. I can say that as a younger teacher I had so much more control over how I delivered the information. Nowadays, it seems like knowing the subject and explaining it matter much less than the visual aspect of it. For example I was asked to come up with a virtual classroom presentation using bitmojis. While it looks “cute” I really do not understand the educational value of it and why the principal wants me to do it.

[Anonymous]

1. How many hours I spend working.
2. How much I hate grading.
3. How hard managing student behavior is.
4. How scared I am of retaliation by parents, co-workers, and admins for doing my job (failing a student, advocating for IEP, or just random things I've said that are taken totally out of context.)

[Anonymous]

Lack of accountability

I'm also a career switcher. There is no accountability for anything. They get an automatic 50% on assignments, retries on failed tests, and make-up packets for excessive absenteeism. I think this would be fine as a seldom used policy for kids with special circumstances, but as a blanket policy it just encourages laziness.

Parents also seem to only care about the grades and will do virtually anything to get their way. I could possibly understand it if college was free for anyone with over a certain GPA. If I catch a child cheating on an exam, the parents will be in the main office to complain that if I did a better job teaching the material then the child wouldn't need to cheat. And my administrators find a "middle ground" by asking me to design an entirely new test for the child to take.

[Anonymous]

How students are allowed to run the school. How administrators tiptoe around students with severe behavior issues, but we’re expected to deal with it day in and day out. How the fact that one student with serious behavior issues can derail the rest of the class from learning, but at data chats it’s considered to be making excuses when I point out that the week that I introduced fractions was the week that Larlo tore the room apart one of the days and then another day that week he kicked the metal teacher desk over and over again for the entire math block, but when I called for administrative support no one was available to come help.

But that wouldn’t have really helped for more than a few minutes since administrators do not remove students for disrupting the class that way and they’ll just call me out into the hallway to meet with them and the student and in front of the student tell me it’s my fault he behaved that way because I didn’t take the time to explain why he has to do the work, and if I just explained why he has to do it he’ll comply. And the student will try to hide his smile because he knows he won’t face any consequences for his actions. How I have brought up concerns about the student during our collaborative problem solving meetings, but I am told we should wait to go to an EMT until something egregious happens because the mom is combative and will accuse us of being racist or otherwise biased, and how “he never acts like this at home”, so I must be provoking him to act like that. Never mind that he behaves that way in all other school settings. I just need to continue collecting data and document every event.

That’s it in a nutshell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How students are allowed to run the school. How administrators tiptoe around students with severe behavior issues, but we’re expected to deal with it day in and day out. How the fact that one student with serious behavior issues can derail the rest of the class from learning, but at data chats it’s considered to be making excuses when I point out that the week that I introduced fractions was the week that Larlo tore the room apart one of the days and then another day that week he kicked the metal teacher desk over and over again for the entire math block, but when I called for administrative support no one was available to come help.

But that wouldn’t have really helped for more than a few minutes since administrators do not remove students for disrupting the class that way and they’ll just call me out into the hallway to meet with them and the student and in front of the student tell me it’s my fault he behaved that way because I didn’t take the time to explain why he has to do the work, and if I just explained why he has to do it he’ll comply. And the student will try to hide his smile because he knows he won’t face any consequences for his actions. How I have brought up concerns about the student during our collaborative problem solving meetings, but I am told we should wait to go to an EMT until something egregious happens because the mom is combative and will accuse us of being racist or otherwise biased, and how “he never acts like this at home”, so I must be provoking him to act like that. Never mind that he behaves that way in all other school settings. I just need to continue collecting data and document every event.

That’s it in a nutshell.

+100

The one positive of this is I will be so careful about the school environment I put my own children in. I will do anything for them not to have to put up with that type of behavior from other students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've been teaching more than half my life now. What is surprising to me is the severity of behaviors that are allowed to occur in classrooms. Kids who display dangerous behaviors, over and over, and teachers are just expected to deal with it. There are no TA's available or given to help without a special education diagnosis and that can literally take years, unless the parent pushes for it.

It is also shocking to me that schools drag their feet in evaluating for special education. Even when I as a teacher have triple the amount of documentation of interventions and data that is typically required.

I took 5 years off and the behaviors are so much worse than I ever had to deal with before. There are now kids who have minimal supports who are way more violent than the kids i taught in center-based EBD programs.

[Anonymous]

I expected it to be hard work that isn’t valued by society. What I didn’t expect is that problems with simple solutions would never be resolved. A lot of the issues that exist at my school could disappear if admin actually did something about it.

I also didn’t expect for there to be so many teachers who are bad at their job or who don’t know their content. I’ve come across so many teachers who have no business being in a classroom, or who teach their students incorrect information. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised by it considering the low passing threshold for praxis scores.