"my mom, a middle school civics and reading teacher, is up every day at 5:30, drives a 30mins-1hr commute to get to school by 7:30, and teaches until 2:30. she packs leftover soup for her 40-minute lunch hour, which is spent grading assignments. during that 7:30-2:30 working period, she’s teaching, designing lesson plans, meeting with individual students, helping younger teachers, meeting with administrators, and dealing with the near-weekly “kid brought a weapon to school” incident—and hers is considered one of the safer schools in the city. after 2:30, she meets with more students and/or parents (usually until about 3:30, but basically not until she’s dealt with all the miscellaneous daily necessities), and then prepares for tomorrow’s lessons. there’s at least one after-school faculty/department meeting per week, and she’s the moderator of the after-school “homework club” (tutoring/making sure students do their work). in the summer, she works on the curriculum-planning committee. oh, and she also happens to be the school’s union representative. when she retires in a couple years, she’ll probably need to take a job in a parochial school to supplement her pension and savings.
the most amazing thing about all this is that this level of commitment is the norm for teachers in her school. and the type of work they’re doing isn’t the type of work you can give 50% effort to. there’s little, if any, down time, and you have to be a special subset of “people people” to connect with young students. many of whom, by the way, are coming from horrible conditions at home.
i don’t know how any sane person who knows a teacher could think teachers are overpaid. if anything, we need to pay these people more, and find ways to attract college graduates to teaching jobs, because there simply aren’t enough people willing to do the work nowadays. it confuses and sickens me that politicians and commentators could pick teachers as the problem in society.
tl;dr: i’m way lazier than my mom, an overworked, underpaid middle school teacher."
— EmperorNortonI comments on Well maybe your mom is a shitty teacher
