Preface
I'm a paraeducator. I support teachers by assisting needy students in achieving learning goals. I am not defending myself (not that there's anything wrong with that). I am defending the teachers.
Literature putting the number of teacher duty hours at or around 6 hours, 57 minutes contributes to a body of misinformation about the teaching profession. Portrayals of teachers on probation collecting full pay while awaiting years-long disciplinary review also do not help. These stories contribute to a perception that teaching is a relatively undemanding but surprisingly lucrative career. Teachers do more -- and spend more time doing it, and do it better -- than their critics acknowledge.
Some criticisms are matters of interpretation, but others are simply inaccurate. The 6 hours, 57 minutes only counts the time the teacher is required to be present in school, teaching and planning. It is impossible for a teacher to finish all planning, grading, conferencing, and other work in the fifty minutes or hour of planning time provided within that schedule. Inevitably, the teacher must arrive early, stay late, and probably take work home after that. Most teachers are quite willing, if not happy, to do so. But it is only natural and right for them to be offended when critics suggest they are generously paid and unfairly granted job security. Indeed, good pay, benefits and job security are not very much for a teacher to expect considering what is expected of a teacher.
The job security part especially gets a bum rap. Tenure is easy to get if easy means getting through four years of college, a semester of student teaching, two successful years of regular teaching and career-long continuing education courses during your personal time. Now, it is true that some of the people who make it through this process are not great at what they do. But so what? Who is? If you think there are too many lousy teachers getting automatically re-hired every year, I would invite you to try to become a teacher. Go through the experience that makes half of new teachers leave after five years, suggesting that teaching is not actually so easy a career to stay in.
So what makes teaching not a relatively undemanding job?
Lessons don’t just have to be taught; they also have to be planned. Since good planning takes about as much time as good teaching, a good teacher will spend about an hour planning for every hour teaching. A teacher who teaches several sections of the same course may be able to use one general lesson plan to cover several classes, but a teacher is also expected to differentiate instruction to accommodate students’ individual needs. You will be teaching students with ADHD who can’t concentrate long enough to name and date their papers, right along with students who finish whatever work you give them seemingly before you’ve finished handing the papers out. You will have students who can’t along with those who just won’t in addition to those who only very grudgingly will. All at the same time. If you get too many can’ts and won’ts, you may soon be subject to pay cuts or firing. You see, it’s your problem if the kids are improperly rested, nourished, parented, what-have-you, and their work suffers. If you insist that these ingredients are crucial to a student’s success, you will be accused of making excuses.
But isn’t the planning period plenty of time to prepare lessons? The teacher has no students in her classroom!
If you’re lucky you may get one lesson mapped out during your planning period if you are not too busy calling parents about missing homework (and missing kids) and such. Copying all the papers takes more time than you would think.
So what? School ends at like three o’clock. Most people get off at five or six.
When 3 p.m. or whenever rolls around, you have a stack of papers to correct, recommendation letters to write, perhaps after-school clubs to moderate – and lessons to plan for the next day, of course. It isn’t hard for after-hours work to become half of the time you devote to teaching.
It is not only for the teaching profession that outsiders know only half the work required to do the job well. I didn’t appreciate how much work went into retail until I worked in a store, and now I have more tolerance for the underpaid and hardworking staff at such places when their omnipotence fails them and I have to wait longer than I’d like. I even suspect some teachers who aren’t parents themselves can be unfair on parents. I catch myself doing this: I forget that a parent’s workday never ends and it is entirely excusable if their performance is less than excellent.
But the same forgiveness must apply to teachers as well. Of course, the people who believe teachers should be miracle workers will not admit that this is essentially what they are demanding. They say they are demanding only accountability and adequate yearly progress on student test scores. But the fact remains that only a part of the learning a student needs in order to become proficient in a subject – especially a subject area that is difficult for that student – can be achieved during school hours, the only time during which a teacher can be expected to make a difference. Teachers cannot follow students out the door and make sure they do their homework and spend some time reading instead of doing other things that may undermine what is being taught in school. This is especially true during summer vacation, when many students regress horribly. Perhaps evidence that teachers aren’t so ineffective after all: if students forget things when they’re not in school, they must have learned something in school. Yet the teachers may soon be punished if the students don’t meet arbitrary standards set based on ideals rather than realities.
It is too easy to dismiss these points as lame excuses for poor performance. This is a common mistake people make when criticizing others: confusing explanation with resignation, as though to acknowledge the many variables that affect student performance is to give up on finding better teaching methods. We can make a deal here. Teachers listen to parents, but parents listen to teachers, and quit questioning their judgments about matters of classroom discipline.
A parent who discusses the difficulties of home life should be listened to with compassion. When she tells you she had to work until 8 last night and that kept her learning-disabled child from getting as much homework done as an average student, she is not making some lame excuse. Of course individual ability along with many other circumstances affects a person’s performance. It is too easy to say they “should” overcome all disadvantages and measure up to some standard set by people in better circumstances. I don’t like shoulding all over myself and I don’t like shoulding all over other people either.
At the same time, it is frustrating for a teacher to see students being chronically absent. Good explanations for poor performance cannot always be found. Sometimes it appears that education really is not a high priority for some people, and anyone who teaches knows this. It is sad when you see a student return to school saying she was sick but having no note to support her excuse (and not seeming in the least bit troubled about this). It is sad when you see a student who says his parents don’t have the cash for a field trip but you can’t help noticing the child’s expensive new shoes and overhearing his bragging about his new video-game system and watching the parent drop the child off with a cigarette in the adult’s mouth. Some people really don’t appear to be doing the best they can. Or, if it really is the best they can do, it at least must do its part to account for a child’s low performance.
It is one thing for a parent to explain difficult home life as part of the reason for a child’s low performance in school. It is one thing for a parent juggling two jobs to miss a scheduled conference or be late refilling a child’s ADHD medication. These kinds of things I have more-than-average patience for. But some things parents can do make you want to scream. Having a hard time managing the demands of work and family is no reason to question a teacher’s judgment about a disciplinary matter in the classroom, to write unpleasant notes or make indignant phone calls to teachers based on students’ accounts of events, or appear at the classroom at the beginning of the school day expecting a conference when the teacher has 25 students to teach.
There is no reason to believe your child’s teacher is being unfair to Johnny just because Johnny’s having a hard time following rules and completing assigned work and the teacher stubbornly challenges him (and implicitly you) to do better. That is what the teacher is supposed to do. If your child is irritated with a teacher because the teacher is demanding more or better work from the student, the default position should be to say, “Good for Mrs. So-and-so.” Frankly, do so even if you think the teacher is demanding too much or is being unreasonable. It might not be the best lesson to teach kids that life should always be fair and reasonable. That’s more unnecessary shoulding – this time over teachers. Don’t do that.
