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I was a school teacher, so my hat's off to those in the profession. I remember some conference I was at. The speaker said teachers make as many split second decisions in the course of a day as a fireman does putting out a house fire. I always wondered how he knew that tidbit, but I took it at face value.
What's are the toughest challenges facing teachers today?
I'll bite, at the risk of having another pipe in to say I'm complaining.
Off the top of my head:
Stating a fact about the job and having someone else tell me I'm complaining.
Not enough time to get done what is required (or too much is required in the amount of time we have).
Class sizes get larger while the expectation is that we will plan remediation and enrichment for small groups and individuals.
Planning time during the school day is often filled with meetings to review and compile data, which pushes any meaningful planning of actual lessons to after hours, which pushes the assessing to...? I can't tell you how many times I've been in the building for a minimum of 9 hours, only to stop and say, "Crap. I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow". It just compounds until it burns you out. it's not a job where you can shut the door and take a day to catch up.
Stagnant or decreasing pay. Rising benefit costs. No, I didn't expect to be rich, but I did think I'd get at least small COL adjustments and have benefits to help offset it. Healthcare, especially in retirement, is costly.
Pressure to have the students perform on standardized tests and students who won't at least meet me half way with effort. Or, at 8 or 9 years old, the students who don't want or see the need to do well on test day.
By the way, I feel like I have to justify making the above post during a school day. We had a snow day today. The power had been out since last night. Had the fireplace going and got the generator going. After spending a few hours here at home grading biography folders, I decided to take a break and made that post. Just thought I'd head off any comments about me being a hypocrite.
I think a big challenge is providing small group remediation in content areas.
With budget cuts remediation teachers are the first to go and the remediation is either absorbed by the content teacher or replaced with self paced software.
I just see so much "teach to the test, teach to the test" and the students can pass the test but truly don't understand the content. What they've learned is how to master multiple choice tests.
I was a school teacher, so my hat's off to those in the profession. I remember some conference I was at. The speaker said teachers make as many split second decisions in the course ofa day as a fireman does putting out a house fire. I always wondered how he knew that tidbit, but I took it at face value.
What's are the toughest challenges facing teachers today?
What the speaker probably meant was 8:00 You are in the middle of teaching a lesson do you ignore Johnny & James staring out the window or confront them? Let's say you do confront them and James swears at you. What do you do then? Pretend you didn't hear him, kick him out, call the principal or give him a dirty look? You kick him out and he throws his books on the floor what do you do then? BTW now everyone, all 30 students are off task. What do you do NOW? and it is only 8:01. Picture seven more hours of multiple split second behavioral decisions every minute.
I was subbing in a high school classroom with students labeled as having severe behavioral difficulties today. One minute a few kids were good naturedly joking with each other at the beginning of class and the next minute a male student said a female peer "was being a B*****" (still sort of jokingly). She took offence (even though she was sort of egging him on) and jumped up and slapped his face. He yelled "hey, I was only joking" but also jumped up and broke a heavy plastic ruler that he was using on the table. Now he is standing, irate, holding a sharp, knife like piece of broken plastic glaring and swearing at her while I'm standing between them. She backed up and sat down and was quiet but he continued to swear, yell, throw the broken plastic, hit the table with his hand, etc. for a few minutes while I stood between them, calmly saying "Just relax, take a breath, it's OK" etc.
Luckily, he was able to get control of himself fairly quickly but that kind of thing can happen pretty fast and pretty unexpectantly.
But, THAT wasn't what I considered a big challenge. When I was a special education teacher, the massive, virtually unending paperwork was one of my biggest challenges and the other was the total lack of administrative support for unusually difficult students or for students who where placed in an inappropriate setting.
I was a school teacher, so my hat's off to those in the profession. I remember some conference I was at. The speaker said teachers make as many split second decisions in the course of a day as a fireman does putting out a house fire. I always wondered how he knew that tidbit, but I took it at face value.
What's are the toughest challenges facing teachers today?
Unrealistic expectations. From administrators, students, parents, school board members, peers, your own family, and pressure on yourself to meet everyone's needs and demands.
Then there's a fire drill, snow day, a student in crisis, a meeting, a standardized test, an assembly, someone leaving early, coming in late, being pulled out for whatever, loss of planning time, a student incident which needs administrative attention, attendance and lunch count, keeping students on task, teach to the test, provide immediate and clear feedback.
Wait? What did I plan to teach today and what was the desired outcome?
1. Students who arrive in middle school and do not have the skills to keep up. Examples: read on a second or third grade level, can't multiply or divide without a calculator, can't add or subtract numbers with more than 2 digits, hand writing is practically unreadable and few can write in cursive.
2. Students who are rude and disrespectful, refuse to follow the rules, refuse to be quite during class, exhibit defiant behavior, curse, fight, bully, and assault other students and teachers.
3. Parents who are uninvolved in their child's life and education. Parents who are working two or three jobs to stay afloat financially and are never home with their children. Parents who are home but don't care enough to monitor homework or behavior.
4. A superintendent of schools who treats his teachers terrible, even referring to them as "feeder stock" and when the governor recommended giving teachers a raise, he said teachers in his system didn't deserve a raise and didn't give us one.
5. Spending a large amount of my personal funds to keep my classroom running because there are no funds available for supplies.
6. Being not only the teacher to my students, but also, nurse, doctor, counselor, psychologist , parent, cheerleader, mentor, and tutor.
7. Oversized populations in most of my classes and not enough materials to supply all students.
8. 12 hour work days plus another couple of hours after I get home. I was up at 4 am today putting in grades.
9. Losing my planning period 2 to 3 days weekly due to workshops about useless information or having to babysit another teachers class because they had to go to a useless info workshop and there was no sub.
These are just a few of the problems that cause me problems daily.
Way too much is expected of teachers yet there is no shortage of people who will tell me how easy my job is.
The expectation that we take a class of 30 that we see for 50 minutes at a time and differentiate instruction for small groups ranging from kids who can't solve a simple algebra problem to kids who are in calculus while engaging all students. Even my best students will go off task and treat the hour as a social hour if I end up spending too much class time on the struggling kids.
Grade inflation. Parents who want their child to get an A as opposed to parents who want their child to EARN an A. Grades are earned not given. And yes, your child can be a great kid, smart and work hard and still get a C in chemistry AND it is NOT the end of the world.
Teaching to the bottom of the class when the bottom usually doesn't want to even be there let alone learn. When a student would rather text in class than learn the material, it's somehow my fault. Just yesterday in my most disruptive class I had to repeat the same statement 5 times and I'm sure they still didn't all hear it. Some kids think that it's ok to talk, text, whatever and that the teacher is obligated to repeat the material they missed. Unfortunately, acorns do not fall far from the tree so parents are usually little help here.
Disrespectful and disruptive students. Put just three of them in one class and the pace has to slow down considerably to deal with the issues they create.
Admins who don't help with disrespectful and disruptive students. Instead of helping correct student behavior, they slam the teacher because she obviously can't handle her classroom. Unfortunately, kids know this and it empowers the ones who want to act out. They know we can't do anything to them without making ourselves look bad. So we just have to deal with it in the classroom.
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