Teacher Annoyance Survey: One Question
There are two distinct categories of adverse job conditions in teaching or any other profession. The first category is necessary or unavoidable things. You can’t get away from them. The second category is nasty things that don’t really need to be that way but somebody is making it that way on purpose. It’s much more variable and dependent on where you are teaching, not just that you are teaching.
For now, I want to ask you about the first category. These are fundamental conditions of teaching. Every teacher everywhere has to deal with these in one way or another. They are necessary and/or unavoidable. They are like the smell of paint in a paint factory; or coal dust in a coal mine. How much do these impact your overall satisfaction as a teacher?
Here they are and how I am roughly defining them.
Tedium and Predictability: The minutia and repetitiveness of daily activities; grading, taking attendance, constantly recording small bits of information; micro-micro managing yourself; knowing exactly where you’re going to be and what you’ll be doing minute by minute for months into the future. When there’s a surprise in school, it’s usually not the good kind.
Bell and Chain: There are five hours per day when you are legally required to be present in a certain room. It’s a super big deal if you’re not there. You may not use the bathroom or the telephone during these hours. If you are sad or angry or depressed for any reason, you must hide this and keep performing. You have a 35 minute lunch that ends before noon.
No Career Track: Teaching is a dead end job. There is no regular or semi-predictable career or promotion path. If you are a teacher, your job is to pretty much keep doing the same thing with the same level of responsibility until you die. If you do anything else (curriculum development, principal, trainer, etc), you have to leave one profession and enter another. That’s hard to do. A lot of people get stuck in teaching because of this.
Here’s the question (and feel free to pass this on):
This sounds suspiciously like research for something. Will the results ever be published?
Results will definitely be published.
Teacher Appreciation Week is like…dancing to no music.
And “No Career Path” gets my vote.
“Moronic and power-hungry administrators” isn’t on the list? That’s what I would choose.
We’ll get to that.
Oh, I had to read the first few paragraphs again. My bad.
Yeah, that’s exactly the choice I was looking for…
Stupid educational fads should be on the list.
I agree.
I know what you mean. But stupid fads and asshole principals are not necessary for teaching to exist in its present form. Some teachers have great principals and schools that do not jump from fad to fad every time the wind blows. But every teacher has to follow the bells, grade stacks of papers and so on. We’re starting with the baseline. Does that make sense?
For me, the hardest part was the “bell and chain.” Now that I’m retired, I am still euphoric every day at being able to start thinking about breakfast at 9 AM, enjoying my coffee in a leisurely way, and not having to scarf down my “lunch” at 10:30 AM in 23 minutes or less.
I came up w/a really good answer (the reasons why I couldn’t answer to any of your choices–are you a Pearson employee?), but a password entry error came up, erasing everything.
So I’ll just take the E.C. ?:
Teacher appreciation week is, in 2012, non-existent; in fact, didn’t President Obama
declare it to be National Charter School Week?
(Or should I have checked that on Snopes?)
Teacher appreciation week is… contrived and mastibatory.
Tedium and predictability kills it for me and nibbles away at my soul every. single. day.
“Tedium and predictability kills it for me and nibbles away at my soul every. single. day.”
You have summed up my vote very nicely. Especially the soul-nibbling part.
Easy: no career track. Some thoughts from a Harvard Ed prof who has written a book on this subject: “Teaching is a flat career where the job description on the first day is exactly the same as the description on the last day. This allows schools to justify placing young people into classrooms to do the same job that other teachers have been doing for thirty years. One of the major problems of the teaching career is the fact that there is no structure of professional growth; there is no visible career ladder. We need to give teachers the chance to get good at what they do. There are few opportunities for advancement other than to leave teaching.” More at: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/features/boles06012003.html
Thanks for the link, Kate.
All 3 are annoying, but the one that’s making me seriously consider leaving the field is the third…no career track. I am a naturally ambitious person, and while I do enjoy teaching and do love the kids (most days), and there are definite benefits of the job (some kind of intrinsic reward in seeing them grow and improve; vacations; reliable paycheck, even if it’s not a good one; getting out at 2:20 even if I usually end up staying till 5 but KNOWING I can leave at 2:30 if I really really need to), it’s not enough to convince me that I can do this for the rest of my life with no promotion, no major changes, and if things don’t change, no raise…ever.
Hey, how many times can we answer the survey?
Hi, Pookie-
It’s set up to only accept once from a single IP. I would prefer if people only answer once, but I guess you could run around to a bunch of different computers.
Ball and Chain! I actually got a written warning about using the bathroom and gave a doctor’s note. My doctor asked, “Where the hell do you work?” I got a “Needs to Improve” on my evaluation because of this. In the private sector, I believe this would be illegal. My union, who is probably in bed with the district, told me “not to use the bathroom.” At 48, it’s humiliating that I can’t even use a bathroom without being treated like one of the kids in my school. I’m glad to be leaving this job in 28 days minus the 2 sick days I have left.
Love this blog!
If it had been a choice, I would have voted for “being treated like a child.”
Not just a child, an incompetent child who can’t do anything correctly unless micromanaged and should never, ever be permitted to think for ourselves.
Yet we’re held accountable for providing our students with “academically-rigorous” lessons and a writing-intensive curriculum in all subject areas. So my students who are academically low (some with diagnosed Learning Disabilities or Speech/Language Delays) or hate to write (some of whom see the Occupational Therapist because writing is difficult for them on a purely physical level) are feeling constantly frustrated and unsuccessful. Oh, did I mention that 2/3 of my class receives some form of counseling by a guidance counselor, social worker, or art therapist at my school? Our administrators come into our rooms and tally up the number of “open-ended” questions we ask our students, no matter how developmentally- or pedagogically-inappropriate they are in that context.
Perfect logic, right? Treat the professional with the Masters Degree like an idiot, but make sure that the dyslexic 8-year-old diagnosed with an anxiety disorder is generating his own higher-order questions.
Until, that is, Test Prep comes around. Then we want to make sure kids don’t think AT ALL.
Agreed.
yep. You scored 100% on that one and even get a sticker!
Not only do we have to follow THE SEVEN STEP LESSON PLAN (which even Madeleine Hunter has disowned) but we have to stick it on the wall next to our board and write down every step of every lesson. Yes! because sure as hell I might do things in the wrong order or forget . . what was it I was just talking about?
Lola,
VERY well-said.
I wanted to be a teacher in 1973…but there were no jobs. So I did other things. Moved to Los Angeles at 26. At 30, went back for my special education certificate at Cal State. Taught in LA for 4 years…moved back to NJ..worked in the corporate world for 6 years…began teaching in NJ in 1993… here I am, one more year until I can retire. A small town in NJ…Honestly, it is LA redux…same old, same old! NONE of the students/kids want to WORK! Well, maybe a little bit..isn’t that enough to get an “A?” I am SO burned out…however, I am grateful to HAVE a job..and really, some great benefits. So I have to weigh the positive with the negative. Teaching isn’t for the average person/the “faint of heart!” HA. It is NOT what the public perceives it to be!
Tedium and predictability are manageable: new lessons and topics help to keep things fresh… unless you have to reteach something a million times before the kids decide to study for the test and attempt to pass it. The bell and chain sucks: I almost shit my pants yesterday waiting for fifth period to end so that I could race to the toilet for a speed-dump. The worst thing though is the lack of upward mobility. As with most jobs, if you move into management, the nature of your work changes. There’s no way around that. If you decide to -admirably, in my opinion- stay in the classroom for your entire career, the only things you have to look forward to in terms of career advancement are an occasional, tiny bump in pay, and possibly a meaningless position in pseudo-administration as a team-leader or department head (in which your primary task, it seems, is to attend meetings). If you do want to move into the office, there are only a few positions in each school, and competition for them is fierce. Your skills as a classroom teacher become irrelevant; you have to be a politician first and foremost.
What’s the solution to this career advancement-depressing dilemma? MONEY! Regular, susbtantial pay increases. By your tenth year you should be making at least double what you did during your first year. Doctors and lawyers engage in the same tasks for most of their careers, but they make a shitload of green, which makes dealing with the same illnesses and legal situations over and over again tolerable. There also needs to be more positions in the office, with greater specialization and less overlap, so that there is room for people who want to move up to actually move.
Of course, this is a pipe-dream. Teachers get paid like shit. Always have, always will. Public education gets underfunded, while banks get bailed-out. Educators are told they must fix all of society’s woes, but are held at the same esteem and given as much authority to do so as plumbers and waiters… The whole set-up is a fucking joke.
Sorry for the rant. It’s the end of the school year, and my positive attitude and optimistic spirit are pretty much tapped.
Well said J.
Useless daily tedium. There’s the daily stuff that actually helps you do your work and then there’s the daily stuff that just gets in the way. In DCPS there is no such thing as predictability. Every lesson is fun and different for me, the kids constantly change, and of course there are countless problems that you have to troubleshoot.
So for me it’s a toss up between Tedium and Predictability, and the non existent choice of bureaucracy (can we add that it?). Within the T&P category I lump useless staff meetings, the infomercial that is staff development, and ever changing administration that always seems to have new and better ideas than the last one.
Also, given the current state of things, turnover and budget cuts seem to fall under T&P as well.
“The infomercial that is staff development.” I love that line.
Can you say, Rigor and effectiveness and making subject matter relevant while taking ownership of the new Sunshine State Standards 2.0 with differentiation for different learning modalities while also maximizing in class time for English Language Learners by teaching bell to bell and using common language to ensure consistency througout the school environment with a data-driven focus on student acheivement?”
Good job! We will now do a special cheer for you.
I picked No Career Track, because that’s an overall issue, but there is really one particular aspect of Tedium that would top my list, and that is grading. Today, for instance, instead of, say, going to a Mother’s Day brunch (about as useful to me as Teacher Appreciation Day!), I face a Sunday afternoon with a stack of about 90 essays, 45 each on 2 topics. It is mad tedious. And time-consuming. I want one of those computerized essay graders!
You know, I wouldn’t mind grading the essays–if the students had put ANY thought or effort into them. Mostly, though, they’re just crap. The kids wrote them in the period before my class, even though they were assigned a week ago. And yet, I’m supposed to read each one and comment on it as it if were an accurate reflection of the student’s learning.
For my own amusement, I keep a running list of stupid things kids have written in essays. My favorite one from this year? “Text messaging has been around for only about a century.”
That was in the AP class.
I finally gave up drinking fluids as a solution to the Bell and Chain problem. Looking a little dessicated and shriveled is better than dancing like a pre-schooler until I can get to the bathroom to pee.
Great imagery.
I voted for Tedium and Predictability, but really it’s all three.
- I hate teaching the same six lessons 35 times a week. I hate answering the same questions over and over, even when I try to head it off at the pass and answer it before they get a chance to ask it.
- I hate getting 25 minutes for lunch. I hate not being able to take a few minutes to myself if I have a raging headache or I’m ready to cry because I just listened to a voicemail that contained really bad news.
- I hate that what I started doing at 22 is the same thing I would be doing at 62.
This is why I (almost) have my masters in a completely different field and drove myself into the ground to intern part time for a professional sports team while still teaching (and grad-schooling) this past school year. I have that super-cool crown jewel (seriously, it’s a really famous team) on my resume and all of the connections to go with it. All I need is a new job and I am gone.
I find the tedium exhausting. By this time of year I just want to press papers to my forehead to grade them, but my Dad who would have been a brilliant teacher didn’t go into teaching because of the career track issue. Such a loss because he would have been one helluva teacher.
Teacher Appreciation is an oxymoron.