Today I felt very productive when I accomplished more than usual during my planning period. The sad thing is, we still need to finalize the questions we're going to ask our kids to answer during the first class period tomorrow during our meetings before school. No matter how much work a teacher does, there is always more work to be done.
Only part of our work actually involves teaching kids in the classroom. This part of our job requires being an entertainer, public speaker, sales person, behavior therapist, coach, cheerleader, and, oh yeah, teacher. To prepare for this part of our job we need to be creators, artists, organizers, writers, and researchers. This part of our job is just the planning that we have to do outside of class time (usually on our own time in the evenings and on the weekends) to even have something to teach/present to the class during the short time that we see our kids.
Now lets consider the extra work of grading. In any other field, I'm faily confident this job would fall to a second paid employee. Even professors have paid assistants that take care of that for them. Not only do we have to grade homework, quizzes, and tests, but we have to gather other formative data, analyze the data, go back and make changes to all of the work we already put into our original plan, post summative data, contact numerous parents to make sure they are aware of their students' grade, make arrangements for extra help with me before school, after school, during study hall, or with the Math Resource Teacher. Now lets think about all the kids that are sick or miss a day. That means make up tests at weird times and locations, extra individual grading that is never caught up, missing data that must be considered after the fact, the list goes on and on. I spent a summer a couple years ago working for the research department at ISU. I helped create research reports summarizing the data which included writing, tables, and charts to make the information easily available and useful to those in charge. Why don't teachers get data analysis? Or at least have 3-5 people who's job it is to read all the data, organize it, and reword it so that we can understand the the data concludes without taking the time to draw our own conclusions just by our own informal research and observation.
There is more... checking and responding to email, filling out paper work, making answer keys, getting technology to work or getting help when it doesn't, fixing old material that we've used but want to revise, conferences, meetings, printing off and sending papers, making information available to the students like what the homework assignment is or making those resources available online, being responsible for aspects of 150 students' lives, and learning 150 new names, personalities, motivators, and issues all at the same time.
This is the part that makes it all worth it. I love getting to see my students every day. I look forward to hearing the things they say and seeing them learn and make sense of new information. I love hearing the questions they think of, and hearing them help each other find the answers. I love trying to come up with better and better ways every day to help them remember what's important. I love when they come up with their own ways of remembering what's important, and then share it with each other so we all learn. I love when they laugh at me because I'm a nerd and it's okay. I love when a student makes a mistake and the whole class learns from it. I love when the students work out a problem together in small groups and I can witness their team work. I love watching one student help another who doesn't quite understand yet. I love that I can wake up every day to be able to do math problems with fun little people. It's a lot of work, and it's exhausting most days, but there's something I love trying to create the best work for them, and then doing my best work for them. The second year is already so much better than the first. It does get better!
Only part of our work actually involves teaching kids in the classroom. This part of our job requires being an entertainer, public speaker, sales person, behavior therapist, coach, cheerleader, and, oh yeah, teacher. To prepare for this part of our job we need to be creators, artists, organizers, writers, and researchers. This part of our job is just the planning that we have to do outside of class time (usually on our own time in the evenings and on the weekends) to even have something to teach/present to the class during the short time that we see our kids.
Now lets consider the extra work of grading. In any other field, I'm faily confident this job would fall to a second paid employee. Even professors have paid assistants that take care of that for them. Not only do we have to grade homework, quizzes, and tests, but we have to gather other formative data, analyze the data, go back and make changes to all of the work we already put into our original plan, post summative data, contact numerous parents to make sure they are aware of their students' grade, make arrangements for extra help with me before school, after school, during study hall, or with the Math Resource Teacher. Now lets think about all the kids that are sick or miss a day. That means make up tests at weird times and locations, extra individual grading that is never caught up, missing data that must be considered after the fact, the list goes on and on. I spent a summer a couple years ago working for the research department at ISU. I helped create research reports summarizing the data which included writing, tables, and charts to make the information easily available and useful to those in charge. Why don't teachers get data analysis? Or at least have 3-5 people who's job it is to read all the data, organize it, and reword it so that we can understand the the data concludes without taking the time to draw our own conclusions just by our own informal research and observation.
There is more... checking and responding to email, filling out paper work, making answer keys, getting technology to work or getting help when it doesn't, fixing old material that we've used but want to revise, conferences, meetings, printing off and sending papers, making information available to the students like what the homework assignment is or making those resources available online, being responsible for aspects of 150 students' lives, and learning 150 new names, personalities, motivators, and issues all at the same time.
This is the part that makes it all worth it. I love getting to see my students every day. I look forward to hearing the things they say and seeing them learn and make sense of new information. I love hearing the questions they think of, and hearing them help each other find the answers. I love trying to come up with better and better ways every day to help them remember what's important. I love when they come up with their own ways of remembering what's important, and then share it with each other so we all learn. I love when they laugh at me because I'm a nerd and it's okay. I love when a student makes a mistake and the whole class learns from it. I love when the students work out a problem together in small groups and I can witness their team work. I love watching one student help another who doesn't quite understand yet. I love that I can wake up every day to be able to do math problems with fun little people. It's a lot of work, and it's exhausting most days, but there's something I love trying to create the best work for them, and then doing my best work for them. The second year is already so much better than the first. It does get better!
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