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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I volunteer in my kids classroom once a week.  I think we ask  much more of teachers than historically, and overcrowd the classrooms.  Teachers should have an aide that helps with admin stuff like grade entry for every single assignment in PowerSchool that we now require them to do, or fielding patent emails about why larlo hasn’t gotten their spirit prize this week.  If we are going to cram 28 kids into a classroom they need more admin support.  [/quote]

I am definitely in favor of smaller classrooms and more classroom support. Hear hear.

But I'd also like to see us actually fix some of the dumb expectations put on teachers that necessitate needing to delegate some of it to an aide. For example, the idea that an elementary school teacher (presuming elementary because you volunteer in the classroom) needs to enter individual grades for every "assignment" is bonkers. You know that's not being done for the benefit of the teacher, the kid, or the kid's parents. Grades in elementary school don't matter and what those three groups care about is that the child is actually acquiring necessary foundational skills for later in their education.

Nope, that was a decision made at the administrative level, likely to satisfy some kind of "Moneyball"-esque type statistics around learning in the school system. You know who loves data like that? Politicians and consultants. Politicians because they can manipulate the data to argue in favor of electing them, and consultants because they can charge you to analyze it. A third grader does not need an entered grade on every freaking thing they do. It's dumb. It's happening because people are meddling in the classroom who shouldn't be. We should kick them out.

And the stuff about parent emails -- schools need clear policies about when and how to contact teachers, and what constitutes an appropriate contact. And teacher's should honestly be empowered to just ignore stuff like that too.

Again, I'm not saying this in lieu of smaller classrooms or more aides -- I'd love that. I'd just like it because it's a better environment for everyone, not because I want the aide to spend the day doing dumb busywork admin and responding to entitled parents. Let's address the busywork and the entitled parents as the policy problems they are and let teachers teach the kids.[/quote]

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