An English teacher looks at the new student writing expectations and shrieks in horror. I would, too.

Yeah yeah yeah. All you teachers are just breakin my heart. You chose teaching because you thought it was glorified babysitting, then you found out you may have to do some work and that really bummed you out.

Do your job, change careers or SHUT UP!!

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I recall my algebra teachers having to grade anywhere between 60 to 120 papers per night. Yes, we had homework everynight.

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Howard: volunteering for a job, perhaps? You’d think differently if you were to try it for a while. Sounds like there might be some openings.

As to the writing requirement, we’re still figuring that one out at my school. There’s not a length specified, and we’re finding that analyses can be something as simple as analyzing a character or an argument in a reading selection. Those can be fairly short writings. The narratives, we’re hoping, can be a combination of one fairly short piece followed by a bigger piece as a summative writing. The summative writings would require the in-depth grading that the e-mail author mentions.

We’re hopefully going to get more detail on the requirements in the next couple of months. I’m just not going to panic until I see exactly what the state DOE folks consider an analysis and a narrative.

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At the last two companies I worked for, layoffs occured, my overtime was done away with, my salary was cut and my work load was increased considerably. I just had to accept it as I could not afford to quit and risk months or years of unemployment.
I am not unsympathetic to this teacher. I just hope, if she quits, she can find another job and not face months and months(years?) of unemployment.

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Hey Howard, I actually think the article is a little hyperbolic. There are some ways around the extremes of grading each full essay, but the underlying trend is valid. Teachers are being asked to do more work with less time.

It might seem to you that we, I’m a high school English teacher as well, are saying that we don’t want to teach our kids, but in reality, that’s what we want to do. As the politicians and departments of education pile on more work that only appears to be teaching, we have less time to actually teach or prepare meaningful lessons. If we have a finite amount of time and are asked to do more and more superficial tasks, that’s less time for instruction.

The increased number of essays each semester is a perfect example. Students learn from exposure to the writing process. With an increased number of essays, teachers can’t spend as much time revising, editing, and reworking the essays the students are writing. If I assigned twenty papers a semester for my students, and did little to work on them, my students would learn less than they would if I assigned one essay that we labored over all semester.

There is a trend in educational leadership that is detached from the realities of the classroom and quality instruction. What we want is for our leaders to realize the implication their decisions have on classroom instruction.

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Wow. Thanks for the informative column. I think this a PERFECT example of government at work. It fails at almost anything it tries to manage, supervise or accomplish. I used to teach writing at a community college and, because I was conscientious and wanted to provide constructive criticism, saw how much extra time was spent grading and marking up compositions. That is why I eventually got out of teaching, though I loved it. I would envy math teachers who only had to mark whether an answer was right or wrong. The educational system in America is broken for a number of reasons, but the DOE is certainly not going to be able to fix it.

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Hi Dunwoody Mom,

We are actually being asked to be much more diligent about our responses to students than teachers used to be. One of our main problems is that nothing is ever taken off of our plates, so we are asked to write these papers in which we explore the entire writing process, from conception to revisions and beyond.

While we can do some of the work in smaller chunks, we are faced with too little time to provide useful feedback to our students. To give you an idea of the feedback expected of us, here is a quote about Marzano’s view of feedback – he is THE name in educational reform to many current administrators.

Marzano refers to another meta-analysis, of nearly 8000 studies (!): “the most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback. The simples prescription for improving education must be ‘dollops of feedback.’” Marzano makes these points: “Feedback should be corrective; timely, specific and criterion referenced; and students can effectively provide some of their own feedback.” Rubrics, Marzano goes on to point out, can be a valuable tool for feedback.

While I agree with the idea of providing better feedback, the requirements to do so many essays each semester prohibits this for many of the essays students write.

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“one size” –

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By my math, that’s less than one paper to grade per student per week.

Let’s re-do the math and help this poor English teacher keep from jumping out the window:

5 classes, max 1 hour each, so that’s 5 hours of teaching per day, 180 school days per year… total teaching time is 900 hours. Add 165 hours of planning time (using her number). 600 hours of grading time (rounding up the low number). We’re at 1600 hours so far, for full-time pay and benefits. Most people work 2000 hours per year for full-time pay and benefits at less personally rewarding jobs.

Teachers need to be paid more, no doubt, because we need to value it more than we do. Same as police and firefighters.

But this teacher’s argument isn’t going to sway people that she’s overworked once they do the math.

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Im gainfully employed my friend and have been for quite sometime. I expect “extra duties as assigned” and ALWAYS rise to the occassioin. These public employees are a pitiful lot. Most live a miserable, self-imposed lifestyle and Im happy for them. ; )

YOU LOSE!!

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Your child will be so happy when he or she goes to college and can write! Let’s maintain high standards and hire teachers who can meet and exceed those standards. After all, we are working for the kids, not for the teachers. Thank you Mr. Trotter!

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Oops! Thank you, Mr. Trotter!

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Back to fancy private school comparisons… honors high school English … 4 books a year plus some poems and other “add ins” — teachers have total “say so” over curriculum — 9th grader has done the “Odyssey” “Catcher in the Rye” and is now working on “Julius Caesar” (I don’t remember the 4th) — they spend most of a quarter on the one book … chapter by chapter… thoroughly understanding it (11th grader has done “Great Gatsby” “Huck Finn” “Scarlet Letter”) — they write very long papers that are graded, re-written, self-graded, teacher-graded, re-written, etc. -they learn to read, write, analyze in a setting with 15-18 kids and excellent feedback. My 11th grader has been getting 11s and a 790 on the SAT writing — he can write really well. We’ll see about the 9th grader — this is, to me, college English and they’ll be ready for college. It presumes that the teacher is really good with English (my older son’s DCSS English teachers were very well educated but didn’t have the ability or flexibility to teach this way — his skills aren’t nearly as good). I think this is “overkill” by the state — the teachers need to be able to do their jobs well and need to have small enough class sizes to be able to do their jobs well and then there need to be consequences for not doing them well (e.g. new careers….) — the kids need to be able to read and write — but they will have other classes and they (teachers and students) need the ability to put a lot of thought and energy into the things they are reading and writing… this seems overboard.

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For those who are so quick to calculate, please include before and after school meetings, mandated trainings, parent-teacher conferences, open houses and back to school nights, IEP meetings you may need to sit in on, and PTA meetings you are mandated to attend. In addition, if this teacher sponsors a club or sport make sure to add that too.

He/She only referenced the curriculum coverage, A teacher’s job goes beyond that.

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please include before and after school meetings, mandated trainings, parent-teacher conferences, open houses and back to school nights, IEP meetings you may need to sit in on, and PTA meetings you are mandated to attend. In addition, if this teacher sponsors a club or sport make sure to add that too.

Does that really total 300 more hours? That would just get them up to the number of hours the average full-time worker is supposed to work, and we all know about working overtime and weekends when the boss says to….

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@Anonmom: Interestingly enough, my 9th grader has read most the books you mentioned in his public school. In addition, he’s also read the “Hunger Games”,”To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Speak”, “Anthem”, “Fahrenheit 451″, along with lots of note cards and writing assignments in his Lit class and Civics class. He will also come home with a summer reading list and assignments to complete before school starts.

I’m pleased with his progress. However, his teacher is frustrated because she has 30+ students in her classes (6 total classes, some as large as 36) and feels the quality of her written feedback has dropped this year due to the large class size. She’s actually taken a couple of personal leave days this year to “catch up” on her grading.

Class sizes must return to a reasonable size.

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Do what my high school teacher did. When he assigned a report he stood in front of the class and said: “You have (some amount of time) for this report so there’s no excuse for grammatical or spelling errors. If I find one error of this type, you will fail the assignment, and I won’t bother reading the rest.”

I imagine he found this to be a time saver.

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I moved on from a high school English position last year, and the grading load and class sizes were two reasons why. I couldn’t imagine having to keep up with these new requirements. The intent of the DOE is admirable, just not pragmatic, and it will have a detrimental effect on student performance as teachers will not be able to provide the kind of feedback and revision opportunities that lead to better writing skills.

The choice for frustrated English teachers is now between providing inferior instruction and leaving the profession. Sucks for Georgia.

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I love arguments that essentially say, “My job is just as bad so you should suffer too.” So– if you are hitting yourself in the face with a cinder block, and I am only hitting myself in the face with a baseball bat, I should be grateful for the baseball bat?

Or– I could just stop hitting myself in the face.

That’s the real crux of that argument. Make all the arguments you like about how teachers should just suffer, because everyone suffers. In the end though, you need to ask for how long teachers will suffer. Quality education requires quality educators. How long do you think quality educators will put up with this? Especially considering how much venom Georgians spew at teachers on blogs like these.

Also- many of these calculations about “full time working hours” are comparing 12 months of work to 9 months of work.

So, you are saying on top of the great responsibility of molding the future, teachers should cram 12 months of work into 9 months of time, allow their profession to be continuously bashed by most people, have the weight of every single of 162 students’ emotional, physical, and academic well-being on their shoulders while completing all the paperwork, meetings, and CYA required by the state?

If they speak out against it, you call them whiners. You tell them–stop whining and just do it.

They may stop whining and do it…but they will only do it until they find something better in the job market. Then they will speak with their feet.

Yeah. That will make education way better.

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@T-Square; sounds like you picked the wrong profession. You should have become a teacher, poor baby.

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1. The new writing and reading requirements under common core are spread across all subject areas. For example, a Lab Report for Chemistry would count as an informative/explanatory text for that student for that year. The ones who should be complaining are the History and Science teachers who are now responsible for all 32 (in HS) CC ELA standards in addition to their own content standards.

2. Where does it say that every assignment has to be a traditional multi-page essay? Have them make a wiki, Facebook page, or some kind of other project what displays the same kinds of learning and curriculum mastery. Be creative, there are other ways to build good critical thinking and writing skills without the 5+ page essay.

3. When have new standards ever changed anything? We will have a completely new set of standards five years form now and another new set five years after that. Do what every teacher does. Look at the standards and determine what the real learning goals are. When you see “W.9-10.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence”, what does the standard ask for? Not necessarily an essay. It wants kids that can smell out the BS and explain why it’s wrong. I may be mistaken but that’s always been an educational goal for teachers everywhere. The standards are there because we should have a broadly similar educational experience no matter where we go to school. Well, and because the politicians and educational industrial complex assume that their standards are something new and different and impactful.

If you’re looking at the standards or the curriculum guides and assuming that you now have to follow it verbatim, you’re doing it wrong. Innovate, apply best practices, and respond to your students’ needs.

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Byte me–then there is “duty” directing traffic, monitoring the lunchroom, putting kids on and off buses, etc.

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“When have new standards ever changed anything? We will have a completely new set of standards five years form now and another new set five years after that. ”

Isn’t that a sad commentary? Teachers have so little trust in the staying power of education fads, they are advised to just wait five years–it will change.

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“I’m saying, everyone has unrealistic demands placed on them by their bosses, and the rest of us have to find ways to deal with them or get fired.”

Or leave. Again proving my point that teachers will just quit. Is that your solution? Just let them all quit and see what the cat drags in to teach kids?

Again- that will definitely make the profession better. Excellent solution.

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Hey T-Square,

I hope you are being contrary now to prove a point, but you must know that teachers don’t just work their contracted hours. I certainly work much more than that, and I’m sure you do as well. I have no doubt you work hard and in the current economy many people who work hard aren’t receiving just compensation.

The argument you are making paints a caricature of what teachers do. No one is trying to imply we should just work our contracted hours. Every English teacher I know works many extra hours with no more than a passing complaint. Most of my contracted hours are spent working with students, teaching classes, planning lessons, doing menial tasks like duty and running copies for those assignments. Most of my grading happens outside of school already. I spend at least ten hours a week grading, and many more trying to innovate or stay up to date on my subject area. What we are worried about is literally not having enough time to actually instruct the kids. Tchr brings up some good points, but the trend from the DOE is to continue piling on things that don’t really impact a student’s learning. We need to streamline the process and give teachers the time to teach effectively. Wouldn’t you agree that focusing on student learning is paramount?

I’m interested in your response, but please try not to pull out a few words for your response, but reply to my overall comment.

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Forced to be Anon – My profession will pay off at the bank. And I’m helping society also, but most people don’t see it that way. Meaning most people only think you’re helping society if you’re a fire fighter, police officer, soldier or teacher, they forget about the other professions that make their lives enjoyable, and criticize us for wanting to make money. Some teachers may leave, but in my experience, the better teachers are doing it because they enjoy it, not because they’re getting paid well, or because they think it is easy. Neither of us is ever going to convince the other that they’re wrong about their point of view. I’m assuming your point of view comes from a teaching background, and my point of view comes from going to really crappy public schools, where I heard the teachers making the same complaints being made here, but they weren’t teaching to begin with, so I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now.

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Maureen:

Not to pry, but please tell it’s not Jordan? Then again a few teachers have said they are throwing in the towel after this year so maybe not.

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guess I just don’t understand why people in Georgia hate teachers with such venom

Oh, my goodness – this is just a silly statement. Teachers are not “hated”. In fact, most parents/community members I know or have come across value the work that teachers do and are thankful for their presence in our children’s lives.

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I just LOVE how anonymous “heroes of business” come on this blog and flog teachers for being lazy. They ALL have “sweatshop” type jobs that make them miserale and they want everyone else to be miserable as well. They also have an “assembly line” view of education. Simply speed-up the line and things will improve. Real learning doesn’t work that way.

Why don’t you anonymous “education experts” man-up, use your real names and give specific examples of how your jobs have become more difficult because of unreasonable demands from management? I didn’t think so. You have no credibility.

I’m not blogging on company time. I’m comfortably retired after teaching, coaching and administering for 31 years. I know that my situation must pi$$ you off no end but….. life’s tough. Isn’t it?

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There were always a few students who would complain over the fact that, in addition to the time demands of a job, they had to prepare research papers, etc for a demanding instructor. My response: “And this time demand takes you completely by surprise”?

These number, English teacher, are indeed overwhelming. However, just like those students who decided to saddle themselves with both full time jobs and full time course loads…WHAT’S THE JUSTIFICATION FOR YOUR CONCERN? Did you not realize, at the very beginning when you decided to teach, that these demands on your time just might, at some point, approach the “edges of your time envelope”. Spare us the Hamlet act of jumping out of windows…you knew (or SHOULD have known) that high school English, PROPERLY TAUGHT, involves a helluva lot of writing.

Your dedication to the job of preparing youth for the demands of life is admirable, however, you will find little, in the way of public sympathy, when you find yourself in over your head for having to actually teach to a meaningful standard.

YOU WERE NEVER PROMISED A ROSE GARDEN!

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“YOU WERE NEVER PROMISED A ROSE GARDEN!”

Again– the stop whining argument.

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….and one more thing. Get off the computer and GET TO WORK!!!

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Surely no one with intelligence would take anonymous posts on a message board as “evidence” of anything. If so, that’s double-silly.

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@Ole Guy

No teacher I know who went into the profession had any inkling that the GA Gen Assembly would raise the caps on the amount of students permitted in a classroom. It has happened time and again. Teaching english and writing to 24 is one thing…teaching it to 30 times 5 classes a day is a whole horse of a different color.

How would you like your boss to come in and tell you that your work load is going to be increased by 25% with no additional pay??????????

Come on, man. Do you really believe what you type?

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“How would you like your boss to come in and tell you that your work load is going to be increased by 25% with no additional pay”

In the private sector, if happens everyday. Sounds as if you live on BubbleHead Blvd.

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Maureen, to me this looks exactly like the New York State Regent’s 9th grade High School curriculum. Similar to what we even did back in the 1974-1978, when I was in High School. My recent research into the SAT scoring Rubric for the Essay, has found that people have found it is identical to the 11th Grade NY State Regent’s Exam. If you have been prepared properly and are truely college ready material doing well on the NY State Regents exam is a good predictor of success. Now New York State has always been bright enough to realize that not everyone is college material and offers a General Diploma with a Vo-tech training in it’s High Schools to this day. Perhaps this is why New York State has always been one of the top 10 states in Education.

I believe that this is a great improvement over what Georgia has been doing. My daughter even took IB Freshman year. I was outraged that the teacher had them doing shoe boxes and cereal boxes in 9th grade IB. Then he pulled grades out of his butt. I wrote him e-mail after e-mail how could doing shoe boxes and cereal boxes be college level or helping to attain college level. He would send me back BS that this was a college level class. I would reply that I took English at a top tier private University and one certainly does not do shoe boxes and cereal boxes in top universities.

My daughter went to Catholic School 3-8, read Huck Finn in 7th or 8th; she then was assigned Huck Finn in 10th grade at a Cobb County School in Honors Lit.; then it wasn’t assigned until 11th grade honors Lit. in Fulton County. The lack of consistancy has adverse effects in taking thing like the SAT.

I have been deeply disturbed by the lack of writing and reading in my daughters Honors classes in high school, She is now in AP in 11th grade, since the school just went and seperated them into AP and on level. She is back in the original Cobb School.

Last year my daughter told me that on the begining of the year reading assessment given in 10th grade honors Lit. She was the only student who tested at reading at the 12th grade level. She said there were several who tested at 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th. The teacher was really pissed that they had been put in Honors instead of on level. She advised them to drop back to on-level but they would not. She even told them that they would fail. They said they wanted the extra points. At the teacher open house, one of these girls and her mother were there. The mother thought she could bully the teacher into changing her daughter’s grade on the reading assessment. The teacher said no, she only reads at the 3rd grade level, and told her she is going to fail unless she improves her reading. The girl, the whole time was rapping out to I-buds. The mother kept on asking what can she do, the teacher would respond, read any thing. The mother finally made her take off the I-buds and try to listen. The teacher said read, read anything. Then I said why don’t you try Chelsa Handler’s books they are funny and they are the right level, racy enough to keep a 16 year old interested. The teacher just told the mother she should seriously look at dropping down to on-level because she did not belong in Honors, unless all she was going to do was read and write. After she left, the teacher apologized for the scence in front of the other parent and myself. She told us our daughter’s were on the other end. She did not understand why they were putting in Honor’s class kids that were so many grades behind. How can you have kids at a 12th grade level and kids at a second grade level.?

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Two things: 1, that letter about quitting was so “I’m taking my toys and going home” it’s not even funny and 2, great job either not feeding the trolls (not T-Squared, because he’s actually being rational) or making sure the comments section is free of them so discussion can take place.

Every blog post these comments de-evolve into unreadable diatribe instead of a discussion of the issues.

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T-Square,

Thanks for the honest response. I wish we, as a community in this state, could actually have this conversation. I get the humor of riling tempers, but I would submit that this is an important discussion that we need to have. As with most political issues, the rhetoric quickly devolves into name calling.

“Focusing on doing your job, or as you put it, teaching the students, would be preferable, but I haven’t seen evidence that most teachers were doing this before the extra requirements were placed on them.”

From my experience, as a department chair and English teacher, this sentiment is somewhat of a canard that gets repeated often. Certainly there are bad teachers. Certainly there are teachers that whine about reasonable expectations. These though are the exceptions. In fact, most teachers in my building, excluding only a few, work incredibly hard to provide their students the best education they can.

As in any field, there are those that won’t live up to reasonable expectations. I’ll concede that in education some of these lazy teachers are allowed to continue to teach. I would even argue that getting rid of them is one of the most important reforms we can make to education. We need to be able to get rid of bad teachers, but while we hear a lot about those teachers in the news, I can promise you they don’t represent our profession. They are our outliers, as are the bad computer programmers, the server who would rather spit in your food than serve you, or the guy in the cubicle over that everyone hates because he does the bare minimum to get by.

When people dismiss these complaints about these expectations by saying that we should have expected this, or that teachers have always complained about their workload, I’d ask them to look at the recent shift in educational policy. Teachers have always complained, much like any other profession, but the tenor of those complaints has risen around the time of NCLB, the incarnation of a growing focus on statistical results and children as products. Good teachers, teachers who we need in the classroom, are the most frustrated as we are hamstrung more and more by people who have never taught, nor understand how to teach children.

While the focus of this article is on student essays, and as I said earlier, I think it is, to some degree, an exercise in hyperbole, the underlying sentiment is valid. I don’t know what your career is, but for argument’s sake, you are a carpenter. Imagine building a wonderful chair only to have your manager come and cut one of the legs shorter than the rest. What if he then sends you to a professional development class focused on the need for varying sizes of chair legs, instead of giving you the time to fix the mistake he created.

The politicians who are guiding educational policy are moving further and further away from effective teaching. It isn’t that we want to work an 8-5 job. We want to be given the latitude to do that which we do well. Teach. No matter how long it takes.

We are tired of fighting. We aren’t fighting the kids. They are on our team, albeit reluctantly. We are tired of fighting the bureaucracy and policies that keep us from doing our job, and I fervently hope everyone on this forum agrees that being kept from doing our job is a valid complaint.

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One possible solution: The requirement is only that they write the assignments, not that you grade them. So when you are stuck with overwhelming numbers like this, randomly grade only a percentage of the writings. The trick is to not tell your students which ones you will grade for which students each time. As long as you tell the class that not all of their assignments will be graded, I think the parents will understand.

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@Scott,
Kudos for a well-written, thoughtful blog entry. Very refreshing.

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Old Physics Teacher

April 26th, 2012
1:49 pm

You are just another sad old teacher who has outlived their usefulness, if ever there was any.

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Funny how private schools have so many FEWER problems. Could it perhaps be the character, moral bankruptcy of these public school teachers, parents, children? Gee Whiz…

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Howard: the moral bankruptcy began within society (read parents, students, citizens in general) and has, over time, affected schools and teachers who have tried not to lose their belief that children can be and should be taught. Enough of us in education have given in that you might think we all have. Trust me- after over twenty years in the profession, I haven’t given up and know many who are still trying to keep the negative from taking over.

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Here is a question for all you non-teachers- when you are evaluated at work, are you judged on YOUR work or on the work of they person in the cubicle next to you? My guess is that you are evaluated on what YOU produced. Teachers, on the other hand, are evaluated on the work produced by someone else. Imagine if tomorrow your boss came in and announced that your job security and potential pay increase was based solely on the performance of the 20 people who sit in desks around you. You look around and see some folks who do a good job, some who do just enough to get by, and you see some real slackers. What do you think your frustration level might be when the slackers’ lack of performance is used to lay blame at your feet for lack of production? That is what teachers are faced with- their jobs hinge on what other people produce. Teachers can only input the information; they can’t make kids learn if the kids don’t want to learn and if the parents don’t care if the kids learn. How is it fair to make them responsible for both input and outcome?
And I am so tired of the “you just wanted an easy job with summers off” argument. Even 10 years ago, before NCLB and all the other “magic bullets”, when I was teaching, it wasn’t easy. I can only imagine how much harder it is for those teachers who really love teaching, who really want their students to learn, who really enjoy the subject(s)they teach, to get up every day and face the ever increasing demands with ever shrinking support – and I’m not talking just about financial support. I’m talking about the lack of support from the Legislature, from society, and from parents.

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I too have concerns about the new English CCGPS; however, my concern is for the students. We just had a team meeting today during planning, and we discovered that in a 9 week unit for British Lit (roughly 45 days), the students are expected to complete 35 tasks. There is a note that the tasks usually take more than one day. For the college bound student, these tasks are not too daunting. For the lower level students, these tasks are a bear. They are expected to read Macbeth on their own for homework. Also, students who will get a special ed diploma will now be in regular classes and will be expected to comlpete these same tasks.

I’m not whining about the thousands of essays that I will grade next year (and I will choose not to grade some and use peer review or self review); my complaint is that all students are expected to produce the same work regardless of ability. Maybe I should move to New York and teach there ?

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Formerteacher: In business, you can fire the ones out of that twenty who don’t do the job. In education, we can’t just send off the ones who can’t do or won’t do. We are expected to find the magic combination to make them better. Even as much as I try with all my struggling learners, I still have the few who just never turn around. I never give up, but at the end of the year, I have to accept their choices, however misguided, and move on to next year’s group. If a company had to keep even it’s derelict and try to “make” them become better, then they’d understand the quandry we’re in as educators. Until then, they never will really understand.

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Howard,

soooo… what was your point? What evidence do you have to back it? And what’s it worth?? Calling me names for asserting you should examine your belief in your own importance and ability does nothing to change the facts. I was simply trying, tactfully I thought, to explain that you might have over-estimated your ability and your knowledge of what’s going on.

Heinlein said: “What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

After watching politicians blow smoke for so long (and it’s smoke you believe), people begin to believe they “know” things. Before you spout off about specific conditions WHICH YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT (even thought you BELIEVE you have the opinion from on high), you might consider that you’ve taken a position on something you know nothing about!

Going to school and being a student does not qualify you to tell a teacher how to perform his/her job. And if you ARE that good, I’m sure your local school system would be ecstatic to get you as a teacher.

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Those of us in the private sector can only wonder at the rampant self-pity of some on this blog purporting to be teachers.

If you feel so abused by principals and taxpayers — why are you still in the profession?

Also extremely odd is all the free time you seem to have. Day after day, and during working hours, you have the leisure time (and no supervision?) to repeatedly post to blog topics!

Who’s paying for this?

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Perhaps we can solve this great debate by simply paying teachers by the hour?

I’ll gladly clock in and out each day. That way if I stay late, attend an after school event or meeting, work on Saturday, participate in summer trainings, gate-duty at sport events, school club meetings, school dances, etc., I can be paid a fair hourly wage for my time. Instead of grading papers at home, I’ll return to school, clock in and grade them in my classroom. Once I hit 40 hours, overtime pay will kick in.

Lazy teachers will not be rewarded and the hardworking teachers will be paid handsomely for their hard work and dedication.

I’ll be the first to sign up.

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Ashley, I take your comment as an offer to help grade these essays. Let me know when you are free next year. Teacherandmom, great idea! This week alone, I have already clocked in 17 hours of over time. After tomorrow, I will have at the very minimum 25 hours of over time. That number doesn’t even include the several hours I will spend this weekend grading essay test and planning for final exams. I especially would like over time pay during research paper time when I basically don’t see my family for two weeks, logging in 20 hours per weekend for two weekends in a row.

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@I love teaching: if we get paid by the hour, then do we get an actual lunch break or do we get paid for sitting with our kids? I’d be happy to clock out and go eat real food- even just once a week! If they pay me while I’m sitting with kids, I’d be up to about ten hours daily. Dang, that’d make up for furlough days pretty nicely!

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Ron F.- my point exactly, even if I didn’t actually say it. Goes along with the earlier comment about privates schools not having these same issues. Both situations- corporate America and private schools- can choose who they deal with. Public schools can’t and they are expected to, as you said, ” find the magic combination to make them better.” And when they don’t, it’s not the student’s fault for not putting forth any effort- it’s the teacher’s fault for being a “glorified babysitter” as an earlier post put it. Good teachers who care and want to do a good job will eventually leave the profession and it really will be “glorified babysitters” just looking for summer break.

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@A working woman “…the difference, I love teaching is that we working in the private sector don’t have a blog where we daily complain about our jobs. ”

Or maybe the difference is you don’t have a blog that is supposed to be about issues that pertain to your profession, but which is constantly hijacked by those outside your profession to attack you, call you lazy and overpaid, and to label you a whiner anytime you dare raise concerns about current events in your profession.

“You have to realize that the very people you want support from are the very people you are turning off by your constant complaining about how everything and everyone is unfair to you and that you are overworked and underpaid. So are we.”

I have many times commented that EVERYONE, public and private sector is currently overworked. I really do not understand the mindset that seems to be, “We are being screwed over, so you should be too!” I would be the first to rally behind any movement in the private sector to offer better working conditions to private sector workers. After all, many teachers have family and friends in the private sector. I do not like to see anyone being exploited or mistreated by management.

For years I listened to people in the private sector make fun of me and my colleagues for working in a field where we got paid so little while they were doing so well. They bought the big houses and new cars, while I saved for 20 years to make a down payment on a fixer upper, and drive a 12 year old compact. And now suddenly, when they are suffering, my small, steady paycheck that they turned their noses up at for years, is suddenly an indication of my greed. I find that more than a little hypocritical.

I complain because too often, what I am being asked to do is affecting my ability to do the best for my students – YOUR CHILDREN – the unique individuals I am trying to educate to be best of my ability! Maybe if some of you would actually listen to what we are trying to tell you, you would understand that many of us are concerned for YOUR CHILDREN and their education! Being told over and over by the parents of children I serve that I am merely an overpaid babysitter, does not really encourage me to put in those 13 hour days!

@Brandy Yes. I am currently working with a team on the CCS standards in math and reading. They are still tweaking their Common Core components even now – revising them in response to input from educators – dealing with weaknesses my team started pointing out within a short time of sitting down to analyze them. So how, I wonder, did they get to the stage of being implemented across several states with these inherent weaknesses, when a dozen elementary teachers can pick up on those weaknesses in a matter of hours? Who wrote these things? Where was the oversight?

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@I Love Teaching…Thank you for working on such a team! I have the same questions and can only come up with one answer: Someone who wanted to make more money–

-money for new tests, new benchmarks, new test preparation materials and programs
-money for new “aligned” curricula programs
-money for new “aligned” textbooks and materials (just think if every single ELA class is reading Hatchet at the same exact time, how many additional class sets will have to be purchased?)
-money for new PD programs
-money for new curriculum maps–I accidentally came across that offering while looking for aligned grammar lessons…

And so much more. It is sad, really, that the motivating factor is not improving learning, not improving instruction, not improving performance–it is making more money. In fact, I wonder if the entire thing is engineered to fail, since that would provide more opportunities to make money.

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@Another comment from 1:15 pm
I think you probably mean well with your post, and that you probably think we’re all a bunch of whining ninnies for not coming to the conclusion you suggest, but the age gap between the classroom environment that high school English teachers manage daily and the environment of a graduate level classroom is very wide—often ten or more years and almost never fewer than five. Most high school English classes, even AP level classes, require a diligent attention that precludes any sustained ability to focus on grading essays. I know some teachers who do grade while their classes are in the room—with meaningful assignments in front of them, and I often walk by those classrooms and see several heads down with many others off task and causing distractions to the other students if not the teachers. High school and graduate school are far from the same; paying adult customers approach academic work with more maturity than mandated attendees. High school teachers are expected to engage students at all times, and heads down, according to the people who evaluate us, are signs of bad teaching, not lazy learning.

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An awesome article about keeping the politicians out of public education (and heck, if we keep the people who don’t have a clue from telling the people who have spent years preparing for this profession how to do it, we will see results).

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/politics-and-education-dont-mix/256303/

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And another zinger: “Bureaucracy fails, in part, because it honors leadership as a primary quality over expertise, commits to ideological solutions without identifying and clarifying problems first, and repeats the same reforms over and over while expecting different results: our standards/testing model is more than a century old.”

Bureaucracy, whether public or private, is essentiall the same. We have too many leaders, with no expertise, making the decisions. How does one gain expertise? By DOING the job. And yet those with the expertise are the last ones asked what will work and here lately are the ones pretty much constantly criticized and blamed for everything.

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considering how badly the economy is in the tank, the private sector warriors are being more than alittle selective in their outrages. enron, bear/sterns, GM,K-mart, Leeman brothers,

yeah.

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@Maureen:

“A nearby county has already announced TWENTY, with a shortened school year.”

Any chance the AJC or SOMEONE could take a county-by-county survey to get a better picture of how each system is dealing with the budget?

Look at # of school days & furloughs
# of positions cut (include RIF and positions that were not filled after retirements)
actual $ amount that is spent on the classroom
transportation (I’ve heard systems are cutting their bus fleet and using a rotating schedule)
delaying or cutting textbook & library purchases
delaying or cutting technology & equipment purchases/replacements

I believe the taxpayers deserve, and would appreciate, a global perspective on how the austerity cuts have impacted ALL systems in GA….not just the metro area.

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We had training yesterday for the CCC in Language Arts. It is ambitious and, in a perfect world, it really would be refreshing to have students be able to accomplish those tasks.

BUT.

The the humongous hole in the CCC is that there is still no plan in place that will actually hold students accountable for their own learning. Technically, it’s not a CCC flaw, but a flaw in the break down of schools in general.

For example, there is all this rhetoric that tells students that if they do not pass the CRCT, they will be retained. This is hogwash, of course. The CRCT is a dumbed down, flawed test and yet we have students who can’t pass it and who we are forced to promote to the next grade.

I honestly tremble in fear at what will happen to teachers when these precious, socially promoted darlings are are unable to successfuly complete even the smallest Task as prescribed by the CCC.

I predict that the teacher will be blamed.

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@bootney: absolutely!

When a school system announces they are cutting out 20 instructional days and NO ONE raises an eyebrow, we have reached a new low.

However, folks will quickly eat the teachers in that system alive if the test scores drop or a if teacher dares to stand up and say this is too much and it hurting our students.

And then turn around and elect the same fools for office.

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I’m not sure if this teacher has attended CCGPS trainings, but all of the analyses referenced above should be of much less concern to her or anyone else still in the ELA classroom. We should be rejoicing! I work as a school improvement specialist in a high school. In teacher training, the DOE has emphasized the idea of more writing because it improves EVERY other aspect of learning and working and just…well…surviving. The key is that these pieces may be very short, as in a reflection, daily logs or journals, etc. that do not require daily grading or extended periods of time to grade. And believe it or not, I taught English before I entered the dark side, and I have an ELA department comprised of 25+ year veterans and not one of them has cried. More of a workload? Yes. Beneficial to STUDENTS (remember those guys…the ones we are here for??)? Absolutely. As a curriculum person, as a former ELA teacher, and above all, as a mom I applaud the DOE in their efforts to increase rigor and the amount of writing in EVERY (that’s right–every discipline outside of Arts and PE has a set of literacy and writing standards to abide by now) class that my child or anyone else’s enters. As for those horribly detailed and specific units…a whole team of people just saved my entire department weeks of unit writing by providing it for them. And they aren’t crap either–they are well written and thorough. So, no tears here—we’re smiling all the way into post-planning.

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@Anonmom: You may find this article interesting. It compares administrative costs of traditional public schools vs. charters.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/charter-schools-spend-mor_n_1415995.html?ref=education

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I hope that all of you understand that teacher do not recieve ANY paid holidays or paid days off or ANY pay for the summer break. Teachers are only paid for the actual time they are physically in the school. How many of you, Howard Finklestein, work for free? How many of you complainers do work for the company after hours and off the clock. Not many, I’ll bet. Come on Howard, let’s hear you brag about how many off the clock hours you work!

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I’m in my first year teaching HS in GA.
To the commenters who think teachers (and students!) have too much time off: I agree. I would much rather teach “year-round” with maybe a five-/six-week break in the summer. Makes much more sense, IMO.

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If teachers are to be held accountable for student outcomes, then we ought to be given the performance objectives and left alone to determine how best to get the kids there. If the state wants to script the delivery of instruction and evaluate us on how well we stick to the script, then we should not be held accountable for student outcomes. It should be one or the other, but not both.

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