It's a good thing no one reads this thing, or they would worry that I'd disappear in between sparsely spaced posts. Turns out I don't have a lot of time to write about teaching because I'm teaching all the time. Well, yeah. Kinda. Let me explain.
Anyone who calls a teacher a friend knows that teaching is not an 8-3 job. It's a 7-4 job if you want to not suck horrendously, and a 7-5 job to do well, with another hour once you get home as an added bonus. But there's this vampire-zombie-parasitic-takeover-your-whole-brain thing that teaching does to its fresh cohorts that I think may be slightly unique to the job. Because if you don't do well, you don't just have a bad day, you have a mind and body shit fest that you can't stop. And the amount of time you put in before hand is directly related to how your day goes. Try imaging a bad day when you're in charge of managing 30 people. Now make those 30 people teenagers. Now multiple that times 5. Maybe you get the idea.
As soon as I wake up in the morning, I am in zombie mode. I am counting down minutes until I have to leave to get to the subway. I'm planning how many pages I can review on the train, how much coffee I can drink and if I need to stop by Starbucks halfway to school to reload, because really, I really would rather spend a day with a real zombie than a day at school without at least one cup of coffee in the morning and another caffeine jolt in the afternoon. And that's the thing. The brain takeover doesn't stop until I leave to go home. Every minute I am at school, my brain is working on my job. I don't stop for 5 minutes to check my personal email, unless it's work related. I don't think about my husband or my family. Sometimes when I put a date on the board at the beginning of the day I will remember it's someone's birthday (like today, Happy Birthday Michael!), but the odds of me remembering later in the day to call are a whole other story. And it feels totally guilty. Like I should spend a few minutes thinking about loved ones or anything else in the entire world besides my job for at least a freaking minute or two between the hours of 6am and 4pm. But it just doesn't happen.
It used to be like this non-stop when I first started. Didn't matter where I was, when I was, I was thinking about teaching. There is nothing that spoils a Valentine's more when you haven't had time to think about it in the slightest and you give your boyfriend a random book when he put together a slide show of your favorite pictures and theme song from the movie you saw on your first date. Your brain is always thinking about how to make those teaching periods better because when they suck, as I think I have mentioned, it's like being beat up with a heavy wooden bat (or what I imagine such brutality would feel like).
I unplug my brain now, but that doesn't make me a better person. Ok, I'm a better wife. I'm a better dog owner. But I'm not a better friend, daughter or sister. Because I could call my mom back, but I'd just get tired. I could be conserving energy for tomorrow. And I could check my email and start working on that bs masters assignment, but I'd just get mad about how inadequate the training is and how unrelated it is to my actual job and I'm lose energy. Because that's the other body-takeover factor. It turns out to not have 34 seventeen-year-olds revolt and turn your life into actual living hell five times a day, you have to expend a lot of energy. Double-header Broadway show, staring role, name in the big lights kind of thing. You have to be bigger than they are. And they eat sugar for breakfast. So it's a losing battle. Unless you pound your home-made mug of coffee in the 8 minute train ride and 1.5 minute walk to Starbucks to refill. And if you think I don't know those times exactly you're out of your mind.
The zombies have won. I am a teacher.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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.
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.
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