No. Really. 130.
The school year has started, of course, so it's no surprise that I'm too busy to futz around with hobbies like blogging. But this year is different.
This year, I have 5 sections of English. Each section has 26 students for a grand total of 130. That's thirty more than the good for nothing superintendent promised when he first got the job here. Ha. Some promise.
I don't have any earthly idea how I'm going to manage that paper load, or the helicopter parents of honors and college prep kids. I've already put on weight by stress-eating and I don't have time for exercise or weight watchers.
I love teaching and I want to be a good teacher - and I think I even could be a good teacher if I had enough time to actually think about what I'm doing. I want my students to learn something about themselves through the literature we read in my class. I want them to have fun with language and learn to think about how language works in the process. I really really really want to teach them how to write, but there's no way I can help 130 kids do any of that well.
The reason so many people leave the teaching profession is that it's a job that demands too much. Yeah, the pay isn't comparable to the amount of work any of us do, and it would be great to be paid more - but honestly, it's not the pay (or lack thereof) that really makes me want to leave. It's the overwhelming demands. In addition to teaching kids to be literate and thoughtful, I'm supposed to earn recertification points, collaborate in "learning communities" during one of my planning periods, and cover study hall during the second of my two planning periods. I'm supposed to meet with struggling students during the lunch break, except when I have to walk the halls for lunch duty, or meet with the special ed department for a lunch time child study meeting.
posted by Emma @ 7:08 PM
2 Comments:
All I can do is say thanks. I don't know how teachers manage it. My father-in-law is a middle school teacher and every year I see him lose more and more authority, and somehow his voice has less and less weight when pulled into the inevitable he-said she-said show down with a student. So thanks, for all you do. Thanks for teaching our kids how to read, for babysitting them, and for instructing them on how to be considerate human beings... Also congrats on being an ex-mormon. ;)
Well, now it's April of 2007, and you're still teaching. I think you're handling the stress very well. It's good to know that we have teachers out there who care. I think the teachers who leave the profession probably don't belong there in the first place. It's not that they aren't good people, it's just that they don't have what it takes to work with kids,or perhaps they just lack patience. There are teachers who have been working for 30 or more years in this profession, and I believe these are the teachers who were put on this earth for this profession. I think the main problem with teacher stress is that they need teacher assistants in the classroom. These people could help grade papers, type assignments, etc. People in other professions such as medicine and nursing have assistants, so I don't understand why teachers can't have more help in the classroom also. I think assistants in the classroom would definately help relieve a lot of stress that teachers have to deal with all the time. Maybe teachers would stay longer if the education system could make a change and fit more assistants into the budget.
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