the more you care...

Teaching is a really easy job if you don't actually teach. You come to work at 8, you pass out worksheets, if you have good management, you don't have to yell. You can even catch up on your crossword puzzle skills. You have about 2.5 hours to play with during your day when you're not teaching. You go home at 3, in time to see Oprah. And you don't have anything to do when you go home because there's nothing to grade because you don't actually teach anything. This is the life of a gym teacher and unfortunately, many other subject teachers. Gym teachers make the same amount of money as math teachers. Or English teachers who assign an insane amount of work because clearly, no other English teacher has before and your kids can't write an essay to save their life.

The more you care, the more you teach, the harder your life is. The two and a half hours of your free periods are eaten away by making photo copies, planning lessons or grading. You got to work at least an hour early, but some days you have to get there two hours early. And forget about leaving at 3. It's a good day if you leave by 5, because there's still so much to grade and students need extra help after school when you teach a lot.

I share my room with another teacher. She teaches in my room two periods a day. Prior to this year, she has only worked as a literacy coach and has not been inside the classroom. At a department meeting this week, we were supposed to discuss intervention strategies for our lower level students. I said that I couldn't distinguish the bottom third in terms of writing because they are all so deficient. I said I was assigning a two page essay every week. The literacy coach said, "If you don't mind my asking, how will you grade all those papers?"

Exactly. That's the job. It's work. It's a 7-5 plus another hour or two at home job. You work as much as you care. I don't have to assign a paper every week. I could assign work and never grade it (that's the other route teachers go). But I care and they're taking the Regents in January. So I work. A lot. That's the job. That's teaching.