(no subject)

[eirias]

Straight from the assmilliner: how we can solve all the education world's problems, including student learning difficulties and low teacher salaries, with nine hour school days.

*pause while I wait for the teachers in my audience to regain their composure*

Just once in this essay I would have liked to see him acknowledge that

A) students (and teachers!) have attention spans, and
B) when teachers ask for "a raise," they are not asking for "three extra hours of work each day, for which you will pay me the same lousy wages I already make."

It's a pretty old editorial that I stumbled upon while taking a break and reading WP archives; otherwise I would totally write to this guy and ask him, as politely as possible, if these things have crossed his mind.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Mind you, the man deserves smiting for this sentence: "More hours can mean more money for the teacher, and more achievement for that teacher's students, which is just about all a good teacher needs to be happy."

(Because, really. I need to pat my cat and ride my bike and read and take hot baths, preferably with my students absent, and have some sex, also with my students absent, and so on and so forth. But I've already ranted in my journal about the perniciousness of acting like education can be saved if only we have teachers who are willing to sacrifice their heart and soul to it every hour of the week.)

(What *would* make the teachers happier, besides more pay, which I think he's awfully naive about the possibility of achieving, are the sorts of things I outline: smaller classes, a more disciplined environment, personal connections with students, the chance to interact with students on an extracurricular basis if so inclined -- basically, a more pleasant work environment. Of course I am temporarily happy when students do well, but everyone's environmental happiness is chiefly conditioned on the day-to-day culture.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I feel like I should agree with you (I mean, I hate that indoctrination!) and yet I do not entirely.

I mean, I teach at a boarding school. So I have all these colleagues (not me...) who have signed on for a 24/7 job. Many of them have been committed to this field for years, even decades. They are raising their kids on campus. How much more involved can you be?

And I teach in the private school world. Here it's very common for teachers to coach sports 2-3 seasons (again, not me -- yay for no athletic talent!). When you stick on the coaching, yeah, most people do teach a nine-hour day, including proctoring a study hall. They do have 2 free periods in there, and an office hours period which might be free depending on student needs, but basically, 9 hour day. And yet there are many people who are committed to this long term.

Now, I doubt the population of people interested in doing that is large enough to staff the whole country. (Particularly when you're talking about public schools, which are much more likely to have that paperwork overhead you lamented earlier; most of my day really is direct contact with the kids, or prep periods to do something I decided to do.) But it's not totally impossible to get a good, even committed and experienced, pool of people to work something like that.

Of course, people doing that seem to combine it with this whole start-up feel, which pretty much does restrict you to the young and crazy people with no other commitments, and is fun right up until you burn out and rip your head off...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so :). Trust me, I can still feel the things that make teachers burn out (I'm in my third year), but the forces getting into my heart and making me want to stay are at least as strong. And yes, it does have to do with having autonomy to teach my own way (which is a kind of respect), and having parents who (psychotic and divorce-ridden as they may sometimes be) expect their children to behave and to learn, and having huge piles of resources (which is not to say I am highly paid -- public school teachers almost always make more than private school teachers -- but I don't have to buy stuff for my classroom and the school will fund interesting classroom things and professional development).

And, going back to that autonomy, I think it has a lot to do with creativity. Public schools are really fixated on credentials, and, while I do support the idea that teachers should know how to do what they do, I don't think credentials (or the lack thereof), as currently constituted, are an effective way to measure whether they can. It's very common in the private school world to run into people who have had a pre-teaching career and this is treated as an asset (as opposed to public school, where not having gone straight into the credentialing process in college makes it practically impossible, and anyway what kind of suck-ass teacher are you to have not been born dying to do this?). And public schools tend to centralize curricula a lot, whereas private schools tend to give you a lot of leeway. So they attract creative people, and the ability to be creative with minimal bureaucratic encumberment is in itself a form of compensation.

They also tend to have much more all-encompassing cultures (especially at a boarding school) -- which is good and bad -- but teaching at a private school is really being a member of a community, and one which *includes* administration and parents.