I know I am a great teacher. I am not a perfect one, but I am a master teacher who has been sought out for advice, mentored new teachers, hosted a student teacher, been recognized as the STAR teacher, been multiple salutatorians’ and valedictorians’ influential teacher, and watched former students go on to minor in Spanish and even major in it, following a love for language first fostered in my classroom.
I’ve been involved in professional organizations, competed for and won scholarships, written grants and curriculum, selected textbooks, given presentations and speeches, and even received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award as I completed my master’s degree last year (while I was teaching).
Yet though I live my job more hours than my husband and three daughters would like, I will never get ahead. I find myself with 15 years invested in the dead-end job that I love: teaching.
I teach five classes a day and prepare three different lesson plans: Spanish 1, Spanish 3 Honors, and AP Spanish Language and Culture. My planning period, 55 minutes long, is supposed to be sufficient for me to prepare engaging, creative, differentiated lessons for three different groups of kids.
Let’s see — does that mean I am saying that 19 minutes per class is sufficient? And that I need to subdivide those 19 minutes to account for the different needs of students in each of those classes (those who need assignments to accelerate their learning as well as those who need support to remediate their lack of learning or mastery)? And that I’ll have time for grading, responding to parent emails and attending meetings, making copies and doing various duties?
It’s pretty clear the 55 minutes is nowhere near sufficient. The grading goes into a big black bag, to be ever present at the side of my recliner, gone through as my own kids are asking me questions about their homework, lying across my chest as I fall asleep with it in the recliner.
The grading is rolled up and stuck in my purse so that during half-time at my kids’ basketball games, I might be able to grade a few tests, quizzes or compositions. The grading is quickly stacked up and put away as my husband sighs, “Can’t you ever quit working?”
As teachers, our lunch is eaten hurriedly over a student desk. Once we’ve scarfed down our food, we hope to run copies, but often find ourselves running from one end of the school to another, trying to find a copier that is not jamming or out of toner.
On the weeks we have lunch duty, we walk around our designated area, telling kids to please pick up and throw away trays that are never theirs, pick up carrots nobody threw, and catch dress-code violators who never had anything said to them before. We watch out for fights nobody starts. We receive no compensation; lunch duty is included under the various sundry duties we may be arbitrarily assigned. As a Spanish teacher, I also have to serve translation duty, which means that for one month each semester, I make myself available to call and/or email Spanish-speaking parents, interpret at IEP meetings and translate documents.
Others have hall duty, morning duty or afternoon duty monitoring parts of the building, trying to keep teenagers from meeting up in corners and dark spaces and from skipping class. We all have to share school events like prom duty, begging our spouses to dress up and make us feel even a little bit elegant as we monitor the girls coming out of the bathroom for signs of alcohol consumption and hit the dance floor trying to keep the dancing PG. We are asked to volunteer for county events and to chaperone weekend field trips. Coaches spend the season of their sports living on campus. Our band and choral directors live on the field and in the concert halls.
Right now, I teach 33 students in AP Spanish Language, 28 students in Pre-AP Spanish 3, and 39 students in Spanish 1 — 100 in all. I have a light load in terms of class numbers. Most teachers deal with 30 to 35 students per class, with 150 to 175 students total. My faculty handbook requires me to put in grades weekly, which usually involves one to three small assignments like homework or compositions and one to two larger assignments like quizzes, tests or essays per week, per class. In a typical week, grading demands 8 to 10 hours.
The school day gives us few opportunities to work together. We have department meetings once a month after school, so the already long day is extended by another hour. In addition, working together before or after school is often limited by additional commitments we have as teachers. My department head and Spanish colleague has morning duty from 7:45 to 8:30 every day, and I tutor Mondays after school, teach an APEX recovery class on Tuesday, have Model UN club meetings on Wednesday afternoons and try to make myself available for a student who needs help applying for college and another who wants to brush up on her Spanish for her job at Zaxby’s.
On Fridays, I stay for the games and let the kids know I am proud of what they do on the field and on the court, too. So it’s hard to choose a day and time for collaborative planning outside the school day.
According to a report on teaching hours by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “At the upper secondary general level, teachers in Denmark, Finland, Greece, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway, Poland and the Russian Federation teach for three hours or less per day, on average, compared to more than five hours in Argentina, Chile and the United States.”
When teachers have more hours to prepare, they are able to tailor their lessons and get grading done to provide timely feedback to students. They are able to live a life outside school and feel like 30 years in this profession is not a life sentence. They are able to deliver quality instruction.
My recommendations to the state:
• Establish more planning days during each semester or grading period, and don’t fill it up with workshops. Let us work together, share best practices and use our resources to enrich our own curriculum.
• Reduce the number of hours teaching and increase the number of hours for planning and collaboration. Yes, this would mean hiring more teachers to cover the classes, but you could pay for it with my next point.
• Stop redundant testing. When you know how to read test data, you realize how wasteful it is to administer the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills every year, the COGAT every year, and the new state-mandated Student Learning Objectives test. You realize the indicators of great teaching are easily observable in the classroom and in the quality of activities a teacher plans. There is no need to take instructional time for testing. Assessment is part of effective teaching already.
• Hire administrators who foment an esprit de corps, and who give us opportunities to socialize to get to know members of other departments and make us feel a sense of community instead of isolation. Hire administrators who see us as a team to be coached up.
• Stop bombarding new teachers with extracurricular commitments. Give them the time they deserve to learn and be mentored by others so they don’t run away from their teaching careers before three years have passed.
• Listen to us. Ask for our opinion. Engage us in this fight for a better education for all students.
• Stop vilifying teachers and balancing your budgets at our expense. Stop begrudging us a yearly step raise, which in my case amounts to about $2,000 every two years. Stop saying a teacher with her master’s degree in her subject area has not earned a raise that will not even cover the cost of her student loan. Stop plotting ways to shortchange us in health insurance and raid our retirement.
• Stop appointing to educational reform commissions those who have never taught, but who seek to profit monetarily from the reforms they support.
