Reply to Why is there a teacher shortage?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Why is there a teacher shortage?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a teacher and I told my DS that I would not finance his education to become a teacher.  I'm in my 5th year in a inner city school and they keep adding more and more work but cutting our planning time.  I am guaranteed 3 planning period per week of 45 mins.  This week, I had 3 meetings during those planning periods so I got no grading or planning done.  School ended 10 minutes ago and I will be here until at least 6:00 working.  I get here appr. 30 minutes early each day.  I can't get here any earlier b/c my child's before school program opens at 7am.  I am here until 5:30 every day and still have at least an hour of work to do at home every night.  I estimate I work 15-20 hrs each week beyond my contracted hours (more than that at the beginning of the year).  For this, I am paid in the mid $50,000s.  If I could afford to quit, I would.  [/quote]

What were your meetings about? Can teachers use their unions to advocate for less meetings?[/quote]

I'm not the PP but in my district the contract says that as long as the meetings are related to the School Improvement Plan (SIP), administrators pretty much can do what they want. Since schools with high populations of low SES students often need their data to improve the most, there are typically more meetings than schools with high populations of high SES students.

I am not a classroom teacher, but here are the meetings I have to attend weekly:

Extended  team planning (for 2 grade levels)--no actual planning gets done--just discussion about planning. Admin and reading/math specialists attend and listen to what will be taught in the upcoming week. But it's not a time to actually prepare materials. Just discuss curriculum and identify potential barriers to learning and how we will address them.

Team meeting: discuss and delegate administrative work and other "housekeeping" topics

We also have a meeting every Monday after school until 5:10 pm. It's a rotation of staff meeting, collaborative problem solving, committee meetings and instructional leadership team meetings.

Monthly we have grade level math and reading data chats which take place during our planning time. Since I work with 2 grade levels, it's essentially one more weekly meeting.

So this week I had actually zero individually managed planning time, unless you count the 25 minutes between when my duty day begins and when the students arrive. Then I have bus duty daily until the last bus leaves. I also had an IEP meeting scheduled during my 30 minute duty free lunch this week, and one of the data chat meetings took my lunchtime as well. I actually use lunchtime as time to catch up on emails and prep materials while I stuff something in my mouth, so losing lunch is equivalent to losing planning.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics