Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daalbar" data-source="post: 2041144" data-attributes="member: 10746">I have a couple of friends who went the teaching route... both in high school level math and sciences (biology & Calculus) at a school just outside Toronto.If you ever think your working life is frustrating and beset with barriers to prevent progress, talk to a teacher... you will feel much better about how things are going, and it's cheaper than therapy!Both women were (are) very bright and went into teaching anticipating a promising long-term career. By the middle of their second years I started to see the fraying.Yes, they would talk about long hours (grading papers and such into the night, preparation for their classes the next day... all this outside of class stuff meant they were working at least 10 hour days and putting in some time on either Saturday or Sunday -- part of this obviously was due to being new to teaching and putting together lessons from scratch). They would also complain about inattentive and disruptive students and a lack of respect and oftimes, a general lack of support from the administration when trying to deal with these sorts of situations (nothing violent, mind you -- some teachers may have to face this as well), but in general, there were relatively few complaints about the students, other than that running a class was often like trying to herd cats.What they saved their real venom for was administrative red tape and actual interference with how they conducted their jobs. Pointless meetings that achieved little of use were one thing, but I found one anecdote particularly enlightening...In her second year, one of my friends was teaching a new Mathematics class (I can't recall what level). She gave the first test of the term, thinking she had designed a fair but challenging test -- a mix of questions of her own devising, some straightforward, some more difficult, but nothing that would have been unfamiliar from the lessons. She was surprised when the class mean for the test was only 42%... but she was more surprised when the Principal approached her and told her he had had complaints and that her test must have been too hard without having bothered to look at it. I guess the logic was that too many kids had failed the test, so it must have been too hard. So for the next test, she went the other way (in part, to try to prove a point). The second test consisted entirely of questions taken directly from the textbook's problem sets... about half of which had actually been questions that had already been assigned as homework. She held two review sessions, during which, as examples of the kinds of problems that would be on the test, she actually included several of the very same questions that would be on the test the following week. The result of all this spoon feeding? An average somewhere around 58%...However, that wasn't an accross the board improvement. It was simply an effect of one-third of the kids showing a marked jump in their scores. Presumably those were the ones who spent some time actually looking over their notes (who knows if they actually studied). Apparently that wasn't good enough for the Principal, despite her evidence he still accused her of making tests that were too difficult.In later years, they both started counting down the days to summer break even moreso than the students. After 4 years, one left to go work at bank for a drop in pay... she was never happier, it was a vast reduction in stress. The other learned to be less idealistic and cut back on her effort and time investment. She is still teaching.Seems to me this is often the real reason for the type of attrition that is seen among new teachers. They either get hammered down or leave the profession.</blockquote>

Verification