Reply to How Many of Your Kids’ Teachers are Duds?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In English at our kid’s big-3, the new teachers are phenomenal and the ones that have been there forever are the ones calling it in. Times do change. Teachers need to stay fresh and update materials and methods a little occasionally. [/quote]

I’m a private high school English teacher. I’m going to be completely honest: this job takes 60-70 hours a week to do WELL. The younger teachers still have energy. I’ve been pulling these hours for 14 years. I’m slowing down and can no longer devote all weekend to commenting on essays and planning new lessons.

Please take a moment this holiday season to thank those phenomenal teachers in your life. What they are doing in the classroom comes at a great personal cost.
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I'll be honest (I'm a teacher). Younger teachers don't take work home. I can see the energy during the day, but there are a lot of loose ends that "my generation" would have taken home. And I'm not ancient by any means. Just an observation, as in many ways some of them are phenomenal teachers, or maybe just manage their time better at work. But they don't do the 60-70 hour a week thing, as far as I can tell.[/quote]

As a parent, I have definitely noticed this. Teachers don’t do prep after hours, either. I notice that my DD often comes home and it sounds like the teacher has them doing “choice time” for multiple 20 minute blocks per day while she preps a lesson or sets something up. It feels like a lot of the school day is wasted even by the best teachers. I respect their boundaries but also think we need to acknowledge that the actual work needed to educate children is more than 6 hours/day. Either we need to compensate teachers for after-hours work and prep and demand it, or adjust expectations about what kids will learn each year.

I think it’s a product of schools also being relatively short staffed and treating non-teaching positions differently. When I was a kid our lunchroom and recess monitors were part-time retired ladies or extra janitorial staff. But they were probably paid $4.75/hr in the 80s and it would be impossible to find someone willing to work 2 hours/day even at $15/hr. Now those positions are covered by faculty who rotate duty, and who are definitely not taking a few minutes to sort papers while enjoying a cigarette in the teachers’ smoking lounge (yes, we totally had one at my ES!).[/quote]

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