From Behind the Desk

A look at the life of a teacher then and now

You want to be a teacher? That’s great. You get summers off and a two-week vacation at Christmas. No other job offers you that much free time.

According to the National Foundation for Educational Research, “teachers endure greater job-related stress than other professionals.”

Much of the stress comes from edicts and decisions made by people who have not been in a classroom in the last ten years, or worse, have never been in a classroom.

If you aren’t in the trenches, life as a teacher can seem glamorous. I mean, in what other career can you get a long weekend for Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, President’s Day, and a couple of others; two or three days added to the week of Thanksgiving; two weeks off beginning before Christmas and lasting till after New Year’s Day; a week or so off in the spring; and three months off during the summer.

If you think teaching is a glamorous career, you need to walk a mile (or at least one semester) in a teacher’s shoes. If you think you can make edicts and decisions that affect a teacher’s ability to perform or criticize a teacher on job performance, you need to walk a mile in a teacher’s shoes.

August.

In a week or two, students will walk into my classroom, some for the first time and some for a repeat performance. But in the quiet two weeks before then, I have a great deal to do in my classroom and in my building.

1. Attend meetings both for the building and my department
2. Gather the textbooks for each class I will be teaching
3. Decorate my room’s bulletin boards and make the room inviting
4. Gather my teaching supplies (For the most part that means taking advantage of the back-to-school sales in July and August because I must supply my own pens and pencils and notebooks and supplies to decorate my room.)
5. Create a plan for each course I teach
6. Study the textbook (especially if a new edition or publication is adopted, or it’s your first position or your first year in that district)

Wait!

What?

The building has air conditioning, but the district won’t be turning it on until the students arrive, and then, only if the room gets too hot. But it is 90 degrees outside right now.

OR

Sorry, but this building was constructed in the 1960s and has no air conditioning. 90 degrees outside + room on second floor = over 100 degrees in the room.

One Course Over and Over VS A Fruit Basket of Courses

Among teachers, there is a debate over who has more work:

Elementary teachers who teach several subjects to the same (most of the time) students during the day with breaks during the week for visits to special teachers (art, music, p.e.)

OR

Middle and high school teachers who usually focus in one specific department with multiple sets of students and have a planning period at the same time every day throughout the semester.

Ok, this is not my teaching desk or “office” area of my classroom, but there were many years where it was close to this. Especially in the years I taught two sessions of English 9, two sessions of public speaking, 1 session of Introduction to Theater, and 1 session of Acting and Directing; coached the speech team with a competition season running October through February; facilitated a drama club; and directed three shows a year.

My last year teaching also found me with a busy schedule: creative writing, public speaking, English 10, English 11, and ACT Test Prep.

I actually preferred the variety of classes over teaching the same course for several sessions. It was way easier, in my mind, than teaching the same class five times; I always got to the third group and wondered if I had said something or if I’d forgotten something.

The career of teaching, by the time I retired, had morphed into an animal that my first year teaching self (1980–81) would never have recognized.

Then:

Lesson plans my first years contained the title of the literature piece, what grammar unit/page, or what writing skill I planned to teach on a specific day. Pages in the textbook or workbook were recorded, or the handout I would create, make copies of, and hand out.

Our college versions of units and lesson plans, however, were documents of five, ten, fifteen pages that described in detail what was to be taught and how it was to be taught. These were, however, assigned to learn a thought process and deemed by our professors to be too complex to write this way for every lesson of every unit for every class.

Understand the process. Yes. Repeat what was in the teacher’s edition of textbooks, in our district course outlines for teachers? NO!

Now:

Move over common sense. Instead of administrators understanding that teachers use the teacher’s editions and district outlines that include goals and objectives for each course for the year, teachers are expected to include the goals and objectives (even if repeated for each day of the week) on the space each day.

Don’t number them on a resource paper, WRITE EACH ONE OUT AGAIN AND AGAIN!

I had many lesson plans returned to be revised because I did NOT include enough information for the principal’s understanding of what I was doing each day.

Then:

Students were expected to come to class prepared to work. They took notes in spiral notebooks and had their textbooks with them for class.

Now:

Many times during my last year of teaching, students used their cell phones to take a picture of the information I had placed on my smartboard. Teacher websites were becoming popular, and students expected that the notes from class and assignments would be listed there. They were not responsible to record any of that information.

Then:

Each student’s name was entered on a class line in a paper grade book that the teacher took EVERYWHERE. It included days absent and grades on assignments. Teachers used calculators for mid-term progress reports and quarter/semester grades and recorded the information in that grade book.

When electronic grade books stepped into the life of a teacher, it seemed like a dream come true. Record the assignment and its due date in the computer and then enter the grade for each student. Then for progress reports and grades the program you loaded onto the computer would do that work for you.

Most of the time.

There were those computer glitches when full sets of grades didn’t save, and you were thankful that you hadn’t returned the papers yet. Or worse, the night before grades were due to the office on the bubble-in-sheets you found that the entire set of grades for a class had disappeared off your floppy disk.

In those days, you made sure you kept both a paper grade book AND used the computer. Just in case.

Now:

Teachers enter attendance and grades electronically into an internet program that the district has installed on their server.

Parents now have daily access to their child’s attendance and grades. Unfortunately, far too many parents lack a clear understanding of teaching and grading. I remember a call from a parent wanting to know why I hadn’t posted the grades for the essay test the students took the day before.

And the worst problem?

What do you do if the district’s system gets hacked?

Say what?

Yup, the district I retired from had a system and security hack. No way to take attendance. No way to record grades. No way for parents to keep an eye on their child’s progress. It was a hack that took a full nine weeks or more to fix so that there was minimal use.

Then, to add to the teacher stress-level, the district expected them to come in on specified Saturdays to update their attendance and grades in the system.

Then:

A teacher’s evaluation was based on the observation of the job at different times of the day, and if you had more than one course you taught, during different courses.

Now:

As I moved into the evaluation process the last year before my retirement, I was evaluated not only on my performance, but on my student’s performance and what I was doing to further my knowledge through district workshops and college classes.

If any child wasn’t doing well or wasn’t performing well, it was expected that if I was a good teacher, I could inspire them in a 50-minute class period with 30 to 32 other students in the room.

I used to tell my students that I wished I could open their cranium and pour the information over their brains to marinate.

BUT I CAN’T.

I can’t make a student learn.

I respect the old adage: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

Education, to me, has developed a philosophy that we can force kids to learn, and that it is the teacher’s fault if the kids don’t learn. In addition, educational administrators fail to recognize what it expects teachers to work with — that every child is an individual.

Teachers have been told for years that every child is a unique individual with an individual learning style(s); with a specific perception of education and the world; with their own struggles, issues, and family problems.

Yet school boards continue to work to cram students into classrooms and increase the amount of testing to see if students are learning something.

The year after I retired, I brought lunch in for a couple of my colleagues. The school year was already eleven weeks old, and I asked how things were going. They were frustrated. Eight or nine of those eleven weeks had revolved around preparing to take a district or state test or taking the test.

When a fellow teacher shared the following article on his social media, I felt it needed to be shared with a larger crowd. The article speaks volumes about the actual career of a teacher. (I thought about just leaving the link to her article, but then, I thought that it needs to be read and far too many people wouldn’t click on the link.)

NOTE: I added white space that didn’t exist in the original to make the text easier to digest.

A Day in the Life of a Teacher

by Amber Lynn

Me: Ok class, today… Student: This is stupid. I’d rather be playing video games. Office: *ring* Send (student) to the office.

Voicemail: My kid told me that YOU… Email: We need you to sub on your prep.

Teacher coaches: Students are experiencing an all-time level of trauma. Form relationships with all students and make connections every day.

SRSS: Make sure to incorporate ELA and math into your lesson plan daily, so we can boost our scores for data. IEP: Implement these modifications and accommodations for these students every hour. Document it. 504: You are legally bound to adhering to these accommodations for these students. Document it.

Pinterest: Every teacher in the universe has a cooler and craftier idea and classroom than you. Facebook: Omg. Did you hear about what happened in *insert teacher here* class?! Don’t they even watch them? It’s their job! How did (s)he miss that?! Yeah, and I heard…

Class roster: 30+ kids every hour, 6 times per day. Student Services: You have 4 homeless students. You need to provide the following daily. Student Medical alert: These students will die if you don’t monitor these medical issues closely.

Professional Development: We’re trying something new this year even though we’re not ready to roll it out and there’s no funding for it. Be sure to document that you are doing it correctly.

Media: Your classroom is going to get shot up any minute.

Surprise observation: Be sure goals are set, reports are finished, lesson plans are perfect, and that you hit the learning target and success criteria multiple times. We need documentation and evidence that you’re doing this.

Standardized tests: You suck as a teacher. Also, your rating is based on this, but also, make sure students don’t feel defined by their performance on these.

PBIS: Teach students the expectations in the hallway, cafeteria, classroom, and outside. Take students in the bathroom and reteach how to wipe, flush, and wash hands. Be sure to only reward positive behavior. Check in and check out with these specific students daily.

MTSS: We have 3 tiers of support. What about your gifted students, pull out students, intervention students? Why aren’t you providing enough differentiation? You need to provide documentation.

Door: Keep me locked, so that students are safe. Yes, you will be interrupted to open me 10x per hour.

Papers/Grading: Say goodbye to your evenings and weekends.

Lesson plans: Are they aligned with school, state, U.S., and worldwide standards? Be sure to document that.

The Powers That Be: What can we do to help?

Teachers: Please take something off our plate before adding something new.

The Powers that Be: Sorry, no can do. Btw, you also need to…

Tech Dept: We are working on correcting today’s issue as quickly as we can.

English Language Learner: *crying, speaking a foreign language, feeling alone and scared*

The Powers that Be: Sorry, there’s just not enough funding for those students.

Department Heads: I’ve been told we need to align all of our curriculum, assessments, and daily lesson plans. Be sure to document that.

Staff Memo: Be sure to attend the following meetings this week: staff, grade level, core subject, tech, school climate, school improvement.

Counselors: We saw 500 of the 900 students on our caseload, this month.

Social Worker: Yes, I filed that CPS report and the other one. Now we wait on the state to act.

Student: My stepdad got arrested last night for beating up my mom.

Tornado Drill: Surprise! Make sure all students are safe. Now go back to teaching.

Fire Drill: Surprise! Make sure all students are safe. Now go back to teaching.

Internal Threat Drill: Surprise! Barricade your door and make sure all students are silent for 45 minutes. Go back to teaching.

External Threat drill: Surprise! Make sure student are silent and out of the funnel of potential bullet spray. Now go back to teaching.

Tutoring: Provided before school, after school, and during lunch.

Technology: Must be implemented into all lessons but also make sure to monitor all 30+ students at all times and make sure they’re not doing anything inappropriate.

Data: You suck as a teacher.

Administrators: *literally being pulled in 20 directions at once, every day, while fielding discipline, making multiple teacher observations, fielding staff, breaking up fights, keeping us safe, performing investigations, cooperating with police, meeting with students and parents, and attending all after school and extracurricular activities*

Employability grade: Be sure to document when students are tardy, not following directions, unprepared, and not collaborating well. Document this for all 175 students.

Academic Grade: Document all accommodations, modifications, retakes, and rationale for grades for each of your 175 students. No, we will not provide district time for you to enter these into your grade book.

Special Ed State Dept: You must mainstream all students regardless of behavior, cognitive function, and/or potential violent episodes. Sorry, there’s just not enough funding for additional support in your classroom.

State: Make sure you are highly qualified, but you must pay for all of your professional development, student loans, grad classes, conferences, hotel stay, food, travel, and substitute teachers out of pocket. And you need to update your certification. You’ll need to pay for that too.

Bladder: You haven’t peed in 7 hours; you’re going to get another infection.

Heart: *racing*

Stomach: *in knots and anxiety coursing*

Brain: You’re not enough. You’ll never be enough.

Chest/Lungs: I can’t breathe.

Eyes: *leaking tears*

Me: *smiles* (Tells self) Stop. Just suck it up. You’re fine. You have 30+ students’ eyes on you right now. Do NOT let them down.

Society: F*ck respect for authority, including your teachers. Must be nice to get your summers off.

Parent of a student: You make a difference.

Student: I know I’m special and have value, because of you.

My own kids: Mom, why are you crying?

Me: *sets alarm for tomorrow to do it all over again*

Thanks for reading.

Rebecca (Becky) spent 34 years in a teaching career, but when she retired in 2014, she picked up her pen and pursued her passion to write. As a high school English teacher, Becky held the philosophy that she wouldn’t give any writing assignment that she personally wouldn’t or couldn’t do. That philosophy strengthened and broadened her own writing.

In addition to publishing her writing on various platforms, Becky also blogs at Life is for Living, a blog to encourage, motivate, and help others live the best life possible. As an extension of Life is for Living, she also publishes a weekly newsletter, Let’s Chat. (Check it out HERE.) Life is for Living also has a social media presence with the group Coffee on my Porch. (Check it out HERE.)

After teaching writing for 34 years, Becky began Ink & Keyboard, a blog for writers at all levels. She supplements what she writes on the blog with a subscription newsletter, The Writer’s Notebook (Check it out HERE.) and the social media group Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.)

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