The Plight of the American Teacher

This post is created by a teacher who is fed up with all the bullshit in education today that makes teaching nearly impossible. Ironically enough, although the title of this blog is "The Administration", I am not an administrator, but feel that in the administration lies the bulk of our problems, hence the title.

I remember a time when teaching involved two things; an extensive knowledge of the subject matter, and a willingness to share that knowledge with students. Today instead we have endless meetings about things like "best practices" and "common core". We have a computer program called edusoft that requires copious amounts of time to create answer sheets, constantly loses whole classes worth of results, is often so slow as to become useless, and is so difficult to navigate that most teachers opt out of using it altogether. We have large binders where we are supposed to keep track of Rti students (Response to Intervention, where teachers identify low performing students and attempt to get them back on track), we are supposed to keep track of differentiated instruction (within the same classroom, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of students, and use different strategies with each identified group to teach them according to their skill levels). We have several students in each class that have 504 plans and special accommodations such as, "sit this student in the front of the class" and "repeat directions to this student one on one after having said them to the class" and "allow this student extended time on tests." We have constant mandates from above about things that we must infuse into our curriculum, such as Constitution Day and Patriot Day, that take us away from what we are supposed to be teaching on a regular basis. We have pacing guides that are full of standards that are listed off as a checklist, which were originally meant to be used as guides, but now we get penalized if our lesson plans don't specifically refer to those standards.

The worst part of it all is that the general public can never understand out plight. All of the above makes perfect sense to them, just like it would seem to make perfect sense to anyone not sitting in a classroom. They see teachers as lazy whiners who don't want to be held accountable for their performance. The opposite is true. Most teachers are hard working individuals who have to put up with a lot from administrators, students, and parents who are all quick to blame them for everything. In this blog I hope to reveal a truer picture of what it's really like behind the closed doors of our school system.