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Seriously????? Not even close. I have one 50 minute prep period per day. I have 140 students. That means I get 1.74 minutes per student per week to grade their work. Never mind that Suzy spent 4 hours writing that lab report, I'll give it 1.74 minutes of my time. Obviously the teacher your daughter supposedly got this gem of wisdom from wasn't a math teacher because he can't do math.
Any teacher who is able to do their work during their prep is phoning it in. THINK about it. 5, 50 minute prep periods to review upcoming material before it's taught, make updates to assignments and tests, make keys for the new updates, keep your web page up to date so parents know what is going on and students can't claim they don't, prep for activities, make copies for students, and grade everything students turn in just doesn't work even if you only teach one subject. Most of us teach 3 or 4 so triple or quadruple the prep, review and update time.
I've done the math and if you compare the hours I work as a teacher to the hours I worked when I was an engineer and you comped all the time I work over 44 hours per week during the school year you'd still owe me 3 weeks vacation when summer ends. So yes, I work just as much as everyone else and no I'm not claiming that people eat bon bons for 3 months. I'm claiming that most people go home after work and don't take work home with them to the extent that teachers do.Did you spend last night mixing up supplies for the lab you did today in your kitchen? I did. Do you have 5 folders of papers to grade tonight? I do. Tomorrow I will spend my prep getting test retakes ready for students so that I have them when they show up after school to retake tests. Thursday I'll spend my prep pulling out the supplies that will be needed for students to make up labs after school. Friday is another make up/retake day for me but if all goes well I'll get to leave by 4:00. Tonight I'll grade those 5 folders of assignments, tomorrow I will grade quizzes for two classes, Thursday it's lab make ups after school and hopefully getting to some of the late work and corrections students have turned in, on Friday I'll take home the tests I'm giving in two classes and lab reports from 3 classes. Yeah, teachers work a lot. Now I'm not complaining. I'm explaining. You're the one who thinks my 250 minutes per week of prep time is enough.
WRT work days there is good reason to have them. Ours come at the end of the grading period when we are required to cross check two data bases to make sure that every grade is correct before they hit the send button to print off report cards. This means that everything must be graded including final exams and the mountain of late work that seems to show up the last week of the marking period and I'm sorry but my 5, 50 minute preps just will not do here. If you want everything graded, grades entered into the grade book, grades posted and the two data bases cross referenced before I go home on Friday and you want it all accurate you're darned tooten you're giving me time to do it. You have no clue what teachers do. I don't even think the gym teacher manages to get everything she needs to get done during her prep time.
Actually, I'm retired, so I'm not doing any of that stuff any more. You put a lot of wordsin my mouth. As far as the planning time, I'm just repeating what my daughter's boyfriend said. WRT work days, I did say "I do see an advantage in having some time when the kids aren't in the classroom mind you". Our family once ran into one of our daughter's teachers at the ski slopes on one such teacher work day!
As I said, it's very difficult to talk pay with teachers. Did you ever work on Christmas Day from 7AM to 3PM, or 3PM to 11PM? I have. Ditto (going around the calendar) NYD; President's Day (I don't think most hospital administrators have even heard of this holiday); all your days of Spring Break; Mother's Day (yeah, I know, it's a Sunday. Nurses work on Sundays, too.); Memorial Day, Father's Day (ditto for the Sunday); 4th of July; All summer long actually; Labor Day; Columbus Day or whatever it is now called; Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Even in an office, where we had some of these days off, having Christmas Day off meant working Christmas Eve, the day after, etc. Nowadays hospital nurses work 12 hour days, usually 7 to 7, either AM to PM or vice versa. I'm not complaining, either, just explaining. No one's lolly gagging around the workplace.
There's also an issue with STEM teaching because those of us who are good at STEM are often socially awkward. In this day and age when you're expected to entertain students and trick them into learning teaching can be hard on people who are logical thinkers. I'm fortunate that I was given the time (reluctantly but I was given it) for the kids to get used to me. At first they tried very hard to shove me into a mold I don't fit. I'm good at math and science for a reason and I'm sorry but I'm not the rah-rah cheerleader type but I can teach to depth in my subject area because I understand it well so deal with it.
Interesting. My husband went to Caltech, had the inimitable Richard Feynman as a teacher. DH said Feynman was a regular PT Barnum!
Quote:
Originally Posted by lhpartridge
In our district there are several options for diploma tracks in theory, but not in practice, as I have been formally reprimanded, more than once, for just mentioning that another diploma track even exists. I expect to be reprimanded again soon, as it the the time of the year when I have to officially notify parents that their seniors are likely to fail French 1 and therefore, not be able to graduate according to the college-prep diploma track. That is the track every child is put on who doesn't have an IEP. Most of those students have been placed on the diploma track for young people unable to reach basic academic benchmarks or pass the state tests. Even students in vocational education are on the college-prep diploma track, which requires 27 credits.
Our school board, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the only track available to students should be the college-prep track. The only track, that is, until the students fail to meet the requirements and their parents are finally allowed to sign them into the general track, 25 credits, which does not include advanced science or foreign languages. This is the track that I have mentioned to students or parents in danger of not graduating that got me hauled in for a reprimand.
Just yesterday, talking to the senior graduation coach (a position our district created to try to shepherd students to graduation), the senior counselor came up and we three discussed the situation. The counselor eagerly reminded me that the graduation track could be changed right up to the day before graduation, and I in turn reminded her that indeed I had seven students last year who did just that. She walked away, and I then turned to the graduation coach and said that I couldn't help feeling resentful that I pour myself into my students all year long trying to get them to be able to recite seven little verb conjugations only for them to change tracks at the last minute rendering all my effort for naught. These are students who either don't intend to attend a four-year-college or who would be woefully ill-prepared if they did get in.
Our district has a penchant for doing irrational things for misguided reasons. I won't be surprised if I get hauled in for violating our gag order just for writing this post. I'm sure most districts do provide meaningful vocational options for students who want to learn a trade or skill while still in school, but I am compelled to point out that it is by no means universal. I'm sure I'm not the only teacher whose district is trying to make all students graduate "ready for college or career" by forcing every student into a single college-prep mold despite individual student needs, talents, and interests. I wish my students got the same kind of schooling that your children did. Every child deserves that, but so many don't get it.
That doesn't sound like it should be all college prep to me. However, what kind of trades do you think a kid could come out of HS able to do, especially kids who don't have good academic skills? Do you want your plumber to be able to fix your pipes properly? If so, s/he needs to have a pretty good math background and other academic skills, as well as an ability to fit pipes. /Auto mechanics requires a lot of computer skills these days. And I sure as H*E*double hockey stick don't want a CNA taking care of me or my loved one if they can barely read and write! Mind you, I don't care if they can converse with me in French!
Interesting. My husband went to Caltech, had the inimitable Richard Feynman as a teacher. DH said Feynman was a regular PT Barnum!
That doesn't sound like it should be all college prep to me. However, what kind of trades do you think a kid could come out of HS able to do, especially kids who don't have good academic skills? Do you want your plumber to be able to fix your pipes properly? If so, s/he needs to have a pretty good math background and other academic skills, as well as an ability to fit pipes. /Auto mechanics requires a lot of computer skills these days. And I sure as H*E*double hockey stick don't want a CNA taking care of me or my loved one if they can barely read and write! Mind you, I don't care if they can converse with me in French!
Exactly. My point is that if you can barely converse in English, which is a problem with a majority of our students, you really need to spend your time on that and not French. If you lack a good math background that you will need in your dad's auto shop or your uncle's plumbing business, it makes sense to build your basic skills rather than being put in a college-prep science class that you fail because you can't do the math. I'm on the lowest end of the scale for U. S. schools. We are wanting our students to go further in life than their parents too, but for ours that means simply having a job or graduating from high school. Many of our weakest students disappoint their parents by not being the first one in the family to have a diploma.
I think most of the people on this forum assume that it is a given to graduate from high school and get a job, but that is not universal. Even many of our top graduates, the ones on whom we hang such high hopes, drop out of college before their second year and do nothing. No job, no school. They just hang out as the rest of their family does, living off the work of others.
I would hope that a kid coming out of our high school could learn to operate a cash register, balance their tray without outside help, fill in a form accurately, write a cover letter and resume, and other basics. Many of our students are graduating fraudulently, in my opinion, as so often they don't possess those basic skills. For students who don't have good academic skills, I would hope that they could become a builder's helper in the construction trades, a novice mason, a plumber's helper, etc. I do believe that their are low-level hospital and clinic jobs that a competent student could learn. Most of our students should be able to get a job based on knowing how to cook or clean, but again, that is not something they always learn at home.
The key is the competence. The students are competent at what they spend their time doing. In our school the legal activities are sports, dance, and social media. The typical student at our school spends virtually no time studying. That is not because they don't need to. It is because studying is not something that anyone they know ever does. Our truly college-bound students do study, but because their school is overrun with non-students, i.e. students are people who study, and teachers who are incompetent or don't care, even the most able are seriously behind where they would be if they were in a functional school.
I wish there were a solution to keep the problems from happening, but here we are. What would you have students do in schools where having a diploma and a job are far-off goals unattainable by many?
ETA: My students can usually introduce themselves in French competently, but not much more. They can limp through a lame imitation of French 1 if they put their minds to it. The top students will go on to French 2 and sometimes French 3, but even at those levels, their French proficiency is limited. I certainly don't graduate any CNAs able to converse in French. If I'm lucky, this year I will graduate a future Army officer who can!
Actually, I'm retired, so I'm not doing any of that stuff any more. You put a lot of wordsin my mouth. As far as the planning time, I'm just repeating what my daughter's boyfriend said. WRT work days, I did say "I do see an advantage in having some time when the kids aren't in the classroom mind you". Our family once ran into one of our daughter's teachers at the ski slopes on one such teacher work day!
As I said, it's very difficult to talk pay with teachers. Did you ever work on Christmas Day from 7AM to 3PM, or 3PM to 11PM? I have. Ditto (going around the calendar) NYD; President's Day (I don't think most hospital administrators have even heard of this holiday); all your days of Spring Break; Mother's Day (yeah, I know, it's a Sunday. Nurses work on Sundays, too.); Memorial Day, Father's Day (ditto for the Sunday); 4th of July; All summer long actually; Labor Day; Columbus Day or whatever it is now called; Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Even in an office, where we had some of these days off, having Christmas Day off meant working Christmas Eve, the day after, etc. Nowadays hospital nurses work 12 hour days, usually 7 to 7, either AM to PM or vice versa. I'm not complaining, either, just explaining. No one's lolly gagging around the workplace.
Common sense says your daughter's boyfriend is wrong. Just think about all the things a teacher has to do. It blows my mind that anyone would actually think for one second he was right. Even if you've never been a teacher you have to realize that planning and prepping and grading and book keeping and contacting parents is time consuming and one prep period per day doesn't begin to cover it. Yes that's part of my job but the argument people use to keep teacher pay low is that we don't really have a full time job when we do. We just take a lot of it home with us. When I leave the school at 4:00 I'm not done for the day by any means. It is what it is but I wish people would use their brains here. Everything we do has to be planned out and prepped and everything we collect graded. That takes time.
I never worked most of those holidays as an engineer either? What's your point? That you worked holidays and were paid double or triple time for doing so? Are you trying to rub it in? Lots of people work or don't work holidays dependent on their jobs. Most get paid for the inconvenience if they do have to work them. I work holidays for free. Holidays are mostly time to catch up for me as are evenings and weekends (another thing I miss about engineering is holidays, evenings and weekends off. I never appreciated how much time I had off then. I miss it now.). As I said I've added up the hours and if you comp all my time over 44 hours per week (I'm only paid for my face time hours BTW so I'm not paid for 44 that was what my base salary covered when I was an engineer (I was paid OT for anything over 44 hours)) you'd still owe me 3 weeks vacation at the end of the summer. It is ignorant to think that teachers don't work as much as other people. As a teacher my work is rarely done. Whatever's not done when I go to bed gets put off until tomorrow. I can only do so much in a day but I work a lot more hours than my face hours and my prep doesn't even come close to covering what needs to be done. It wouldn't cover planning alone. As I said any teacher who is containing their work to their prep hour is phoning it in. I see most of the teachers leaving my building with piles of stuff to grade or staying late to get it done before they go home. Me, I'm never done. If I ever do get caught up on the grading (I stay up on my planning and prepping because that is critical to doing my job well) then I have hours of glassware that needs washing in the lab and waste chemicals that need to be processed and equipment to clean and put away or something else. I would love a dishwasher and a maid to clean the lab.
If I wanted to contain my work to my paid hours I'd do my grading while my students did reading notes in class and I'd pass out lots and lots of worksheets that I wouldn't grade. Of course then you'd tell me I was a lousy teacher.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 04-05-2016 at 06:04 PM..
This would definitely depend on the socio-economic status of the community at large. Maybe in a very "Friday Night Lights" town you'll get the meat-head parents, but I think many people today see the importance of the STEM classes.
my daughter's highschool AP/STEM classes consist of her and 24 other students, basically the same students in most her classes outside of gym, english and foreign language. the balance of 225 other students do not participate and this is an affluent upper middle class town. i stress the reasoning being again, cultural. parents and previous generations who did well in now dead job industries project that their children don't need to concentrate on maths and sciences, and rather invest in sports, activities and popular culture within an acceptable gpa and sat. this used to be enough, but it isn't anymore as the rest of the world has swiftly moved past the US. the problem is many millenials now graduate within that course and can't find high paying jobs. Meanwhile, silicon valley and the tech industry can't find enough people to fill 1.5 million job listings at $85,000/year starting salaries out of college.
Last edited by ControlJohnsons; 04-05-2016 at 06:10 PM..
Interesting. My husband went to Caltech, had the inimitable Richard Feynman as a teacher. DH said Feynman was a regular PT Barnum!
That doesn't sound like it should be all college prep to me. However, what kind of trades do you think a kid could come out of HS able to do, especially kids who don't have good academic skills? Do you want your plumber to be able to fix your pipes properly? If so, s/he needs to have a pretty good math background and other academic skills, as well as an ability to fit pipes. /Auto mechanics requires a lot of computer skills these days. And I sure as H*E*double hockey stick don't want a CNA taking care of me or my loved one if they can barely read and write! Mind you, I don't care if they can converse with me in French!
And this proves that it's typical for someone who is good at whatever Richard Feynman was good at are also clowns? My experience throughout school and my years in industry is that an entertainers personality doesn't usually come in the same body as a strongly scientific mind. Some of my best teachers had no personality at all but man did they know their content. Fortunately, I never went to school expecting to be entertained so I learned from them in spite of their personalities. I'm not sure why so many STEM people are introverts but we tend to be. There were few clowns in my engineering school. I did have some entertaining teachers but they entertained with their content. They saw the nuances and used them to create curiosity.
I worked with some brilliant people in industry and most of them were lacking personalities (and often common sense) but man could you have an in depth conversation about their specialties.
Common sense says your daughter's boyfriend is wrong. Just think about all the things a teacher has to do. It blows my mind that anyone would actually think for one second he was right. Even if you've never been a teacher you have to realize that planning and prepping and grading and book keeping and contacting parents is time consuming and one prep period per day doesn't begin to cover it. Yes that's part of my job but the argument people use to keep teacher pay low is that we don't really have a full time job when we do. We just take a lot of it home with us. When I leave the school at 4:00 I'm not done for the day by any means. It is what it is but I wish people would use their brains here. Everything we do has to be planned out and prepped and everything we collect graded. That takes time.
I never worked most of those holidays as an engineer either? What's your point? That you worked holidays and were paid double or triple time for doing so?Are you trying to rub it in? Lots of people work or don't work holidays dependent on their jobs. Most get paid for the inconvenience if they do have to work them. I work holidays for free. Holidays are mostly time to catch up for me as are evenings and weekends (another thing I miss about engineering is holidays, evenings and weekends off. I never appreciated how much time I had off then. I miss it now.). As I said I've added up the hours and if you comp all my time over 44 hours per week (I'm only paid for my face time hours BTW so I'm not paid for 44 that was what my base salary covered when I was an engineer (I was paid OT for anything over 44 hours)) you'd still owe me 3 weeks vacation at the end of the summer. It is ignorant to think that teachers don't work as much as other people. As a teacher my work is rarely done. Whatever's not done when I go to bed gets put off until tomorrow. I can only do so much in a day but I work a lot more hours than my face hours and my prep doesn't even come close to covering what needs to be done. It wouldn't cover planning alone. As I said any teacher who is containing their work to their prep hour is phoning it in. I see most of the teachers leaving my building with piles of stuff to grade or staying late to get it done before they go home. Me, I'm never done. If I ever do get caught up on the grading (I stay up on my planning and prepping because that is critical to doing my job well) then I have hours of glassware that needs washing in the lab and waste chemicals that need to be processed and equipment to clean and put away or something else. I would love a dishwasher and a maid to clean the lab.
If I wanted to contain my work to my paid hours I'd do my grading while my students did reading notes in class and I'd pass out lots and lots of worksheets that I wouldn't grade. Of course then you'd tell me I was a lousy teacher.
Do take the chip off your shoulder(s); you'll learn a lot more.
Despite what you obviously think, I never got paid double or triple time for working holidays. It's been a long time since I worked in a hospital; I don't remember the exact arrangements, but I think we got an extra premium, e.g. about 10%.
No, I was trying to speak to your sense of empathy, but you obviously don't have any. Do you think it would be great fun to get up at 6 AM on Christmas Day, put on your uniform (this was back when nurses wore 'whites'), and go to work for 8 hours? Or any other holiday? Some of those days aren't even recognized as holidays. And forget this two weeks off at Christmas, if you had Christmas Day off, you were working the day before and/or the day after. Most hospitals do have restrictions on how much time you can take off for a holiday, particularly Christmas, so that everyone can have some time off. Even those who don't celebrate Christmas want time off during that season when just about everyone else is off.
Omg
The past few pages are getting
way off topic, of course.
One teacher on here in particular
(as usual) wants to portray the profession as
damn near saintly.
I say teachers need to he held accountable for their time spent-- & they should actually be teaching instead of chatting, flirting & discussing where they're vacationing.....
No other profession allows for such
consistent failures.....
Lmao.......
Last edited by believe007; 04-05-2016 at 07:14 PM..
People keep saying that--teachers keep saying that. But most of the time when a parent gets involved, the result is an "Oh, shucks."
These days there are often some really huge cultural gaps between parents and teachers. Teachers don't really want parental involvement (they think they do, but no, they don't); what they might need is parental trust and back-up.
...
There is so much truth wrapped up in that statement. I've encountered that often when trying to support the schools. What they want is parents to do fund raisers and to pressure the school board on funding issues. But show up with real, actual, involvement, and the school reacts like a system of antibodies to the threat. I took on the job of creating engagement between scientists and engineers from our workforce and local university to the local school systems. But have become very disillusioned at the difficulty of getting in the front door at the schools.
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