Good Grief

Teacher: I don't teach Newton because he's white

Related: Teacher: Why I don’t want to assign Shakespeare anymore (even though he’s in the Common Core)

High-School Teacher: Stop Teaching Shakespeare Because He’s a White Man

At Last...

...someone tells the truth:

The Real Number Of Hours Teachers Work In One Eye-Opening Graphic

"The real teaching day is around 12-16 hours a day."

• standard teaching day - 8 hours (includes supervision of students on the playground, in the lunch room, during, before and after school)
• 1 hour - come before school or come after school to offer extra help to those who need it
•  3 to 5 hours - day by day planning, grading answering emails, making home phone calls, making home visits, attending meetings required by school district, holding teacher parent conferences, etc.
• in the summer months, spring and Christmas break teachers spend:
• continuing education to keep up with the latest research in their field (two to four weeks)
• three weeks planning for upcoming term
• four weeks getting ready for work: most teachers need to show up one month before school starts to participate in meetings, training, etc. (That might be a bit of an exaggeration. My experience has been one week in advance of the return of the students, and frequently during the Christmas and spring breaks.  But, still, you have to be ready for when the students show up, and by ready, I mean not just lessons and units prepared but have the classroom all spiffed up to go along with the lessons and units and this has to be done several times a year. Nobody else does that for you.)

Teachers

As much as I hate to link to Daily Kos, this one is too good to pass up:

Are you sick of highly-paid teachers?

"Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do -- babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage."

Yah, right. For that we need four years of university and the kids just teach themselves how to read and do complex mathematical problems. Happens all the time. /sarc

Besides, if we didn't have summers off, when would YOU take your paid vacations?? Hummmm?

Think about that next time you need a heart surgeon. He or she started out in grade one, or earlier, and twelve or more teachers later was equipped to attend medical school. Do you want to go under the knife wielded by someone who doesn't know how to read? Think about it.

Sorry we didn't do a better job on teaching them to write legibly.

Listen To This...

...and then tell me if you still blame it all on teachers.

Teaching

 Over at SNN there was a thread about teaching and the wages teachers make. As much as I like SNN, the commentators on this thread pissed me off. As a former teacher, I was really annoyed at some of the erroneous assertions being made about the profession; how they only work 8.5 months a year; how they are over paid for doing a really easy job, etc., etc., etc..

I weighed in, but I'm afraid my take was like the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Then I found this. It's perfect, even if it is from the Daily Kos, which is the American equivalent to rabble.ca
 
 Are-you-sick-of-highly-paid-teachers