Sunday, March 27, 2016

Teachers need to be treated with more respect and higher salaries.

After reading a few articles including: http://www.pe.com/articles/education-782341-teachers-teaching.html I wrote a response to the author.

Josh, I can truly understand what you are saying,. I retired after 27+ years of teaching.  I was tired of jumping through hoops and playing games. The amount of paperwork kept increasing and the time to teach seemed to be shrinking due to the increase in hoops.  Too much time is spent having to parent students because their parents do not parent. More money is spent on sports than in the classroom and parents and community members are more likely to raise an uproar over a cut to hockey or football than teacher cuts or elective class cuts. Many parents get more upset over a snow day than a failing a grade because heaven forbid they have to find a babysitter.  Parents do not come to conferences and even if thy do they talk the talk, but do not walk the walk.  Kids who do not have money for basic school supplies come in wearing $100+ shoes and have money for the junk food machines or the latest phone, which many teachers cannot afford. I had students who asked me for change for a hundred dollar bill and they were surprised I did not have change as I was a teacher I made the big bucks. HAHA! Big bucks, I wish.  The community does not realize the money we put out for recertification, classes to recertify, and for classroom supplies.  They seem to think it is all there and that we don't really work that hard as we get summers off. They have not been there when  we are at school at midnight making copies or grading papers or writing IEPs for special ed students, or at home doing many of these activities.  They seem to think our job is SO EASY. Cuts raise class sizes which make teaching more of a wrestling match as we have to deal with crowd control rather than teach. I have been in 6th grade classrooms with 36+ students where you had to ask students to stand up and push in their chairs so you could get to the student who needed help.  I have been in classrooms with 35+ high school students many of whom were hyperactive boys with no room to move so they are bothering everyone around them and I have spent more time trying to   deal with behavior issues than I have trying to teach them to write a sentence. Students who are highly gifted and students who are so severely handicapped they need constant one-on-one care crowded into small rooms with inadequate heating, lighting, and too few textbooks do not make for a good learning environment. It simply becomes babysitting. a few years back my husband had a class of students who simply wanted to play. They weren't interested in learning, or doing anything that could be considered work.  They came to school simply to socialize and play. These were 8th graders.  They were so far behind in school that they have no hope of getting a diploma and graduating and will probably drop out.  It is sad to see how the future of our country has been hung out to dry with all the cuts to education. We are failing our country and our kids. Our governments, country, state, and city need to wake up and see that they are not helping our kids, they are hurting them. I think we need to institute a uniform policy, and allow corporal punishment in some cases as well as fully fund education and limit class sizes in all grades to 20 students.  We also need to stop all this social emotional learning garbage and go back to a more rigorous and basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic with science, art and music and stop all the crap about we will hurt their feelings. I also think we need to tighten the reins of welfare but that topic is for another day.

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