Do teachers come from Mars

Mary,

They come from all different places. Never Never Land, Bitchville, Slackerland, ect… I think 6 hours a day maybe too taxing on them and God knows that June, July, and August is not nearly long enough for them to recuperate.

However, there are some very dedicated teachers who are as frustrated by the very school systems that they work for. I think some just burn out and others are burn outs to begin with. Kids aren’t the only ones who get high and drink at lunch time. Many schools are scandalous.

But some solid teachers are driven to early retirement and/or the looney farm by vicious, codependent, enabling parents and their heathen, spoiled-brat, learned-helpless children.

Most of us just want to teach and get real tired of all this broken system “stuff.” If it’s so broken, either fix it or leave it. Your only other choice is to accept it.

Since parents feel they know more than educators, why not take the bull-by-the horns and show us poor, stupid teachers how it is done…

Could it be that June, July & August are too short for many parents? Hmmm, 10:3. Who needs longer to recuperate?

I am a good teacher, like my school system, and would like to fine-tune it, not rip it apart. I don’t know any teachers who drink on their lunch hours. Maybe stay-at-home moms are watching too much Sally Jesse!

I can be driven to B-ville by posts like yours!

I don’t know… I think people formerly at Enron would love to have a job where after three years or so… you are in the clear. No one can just say you are gone. Get out ! You have tenure. As a former history teacher of mine once said: “I don’t care if you learn history or not” I still get my paycheck. So you could be the best Mother Teresa, or you could be Adolf Hitler and your job would have security either way. Maybe we’ll take the teacher’s advice. I think we should overthrow the existing public school system. Any Von Stauffenberg’s out there ? The educational system is a one fits all sizes thing.

You can be removed. The administration has to follow “due process,” which means to give you bad evaluations, I believe you only need two bad evaluations (mid year and end of year). A non-tenured teacher has no rights and can be let go for no reason, none need be given. Literally it can be a case of “I don’t like you.”

I have seen two tenured teachers leave from my school over 9 years and countless nontenured teachers. This is not such a big deal.

Clearly business does not always eliminate its deadwood, either. I can name situations and circumstances. I worked for a publishing company during the 80’s. We had a dreadful vice president and it took over 10 years to get rid of him, several upper, upper management changes until one had the guts. In the meantime, this person fired several unsuspecting employees, as a sacrifice, to deflect attention from his own weak performance. It can be truly miserable to work for such a person and there is no resource.

It is not perfect in the business world. Furthermore, I would like to state that it may be far preferrable to try to “save” and support weak teachers than to just fire willy, nilly. Firing people damages morale and everyone knows that. I don’t think a decent manager takes it lightly.

So much for my views on tenure.

Dear Maria,

I found your words reflective of many teachers out there!! Why do you think we, as parents, have such a hard time with ps? It is because of the all-knowing teachers and administration that don’t give a flip about children with learning differences!! You seem to think that we are enabling our kids NOT to learn. How sad you are! I took the bull by the horns and home school my child who is in 5th grade now. Since being out of the ps system his SAT scores have skyrocketed! Thank God for teachers like me, a MOM!!

I love that first of all this is the parenting board and we are not allowed to ever, ever say anything negative about the teaching profession. If the school systems were all doing such a good job why would we have so many parents online trying to find help?

You consider my child a heathen, a spoiled-brat, and that he has, because of me, developed learned-helplessness. I think it is time you join the solid teachers at the early retirement home or down on the Looney farm. I wouldn’t let you near my child with a ten-foot pole if that were how you felt. Then again, I can’t imagine that you would actually say that to a parent!?! And bless your heart and good luck if you do?!?

You said, “Most of us just want to teach and get real tired of all this broken system “stuff.” If it’s so broken, either fix it or leave it. Your only other choice is to accept it. ” What do you think we are doing here? We, the vicious, codependent, enabling parents, are trying to find help for our children. We are trying to make sure they succeed and become productive members of society. I imagine it will be hard to do with teachers who think they are heathens?!?

We are taking the bull by the horns; we are learning what the law says our children are entitled to. I think that is part of the problem, teachers and administrators can’t seem to grasp that the parents are sometimes more knowledgeable then the teachers. We want to help but if you continue to treat us as second-class citizens instead of equal team members than expect us to be less than gracious. I am sure you have heard the saying “What goes around comes around.”

I am thankful and lucky that I have found a school where the children are cared for and treated kindly and the parents are respected. I know my child is getting the best education possible because the teachers care about being a teacher and want to work with parents.

You may very well be a good teacher, but calling children names is not the way to show it. How about teaching those kids instead of assuming it is all the parents fault. The five or six hours they spend with their teachers doesn’t count?

Finally, I am sorry to disappoint you but most Stay at home Moms are lucky if they get to eat breakfast and take a shower, we aren’t all sitting around watching Sally Jesse! So, sorry!

One more thing, please don’t try and feed me the “I come to this bulletin board to help!” That pill will be too big to swallow after saying I was a bad parent and my child was a heathen!

You said it. No wonder teaching gets paid what thy are paid…. A 10 month work calendar and all these holidays off, no wonder ! People hardly have to work. LD people are suffering too much. The teachers don’t want to take tests because they are afraid of the results.

You know, I’ve been on all three sides of this argument. I’ve been a student with both absolutely excellent teachers and with terribly destructive teachers. I’ve been a teacher with both wonderful students and great parents, and with nasty little delinquents (if they vandalize your class, your school, and your vehicles, that’s the nicest thing you can call them) with criminal parents (If they smoke and sell dope, drink and drive, and give liquor to their two-year olds, as well as stealing and teaching their children to steal, yes, that’s what they are.). And I’ve been a parent with a child who had both the greatest teachers and some of the worst. She’s had teachers who thought I was a wonderful parent and others who hid when they saw me coming. I’ve also had situations where I could do a great job teaching, and other situations where I did turn into a monster for lack of any other options.

There are issues that the individual can deal with, like getting tutoring for your own kid; and there are issues that are beyond any one person, like the principal who condones schoolyard violence because “kids can be cruel.” There was a recent case of a kid who committed suicide because of being bullied — something in that school was definitely out of order, and some supposedly responsible people such as the principal were not doing their jobs properly. But one parent complaining cannot make much of a change in such rock-solid ignorance (I know — been there and done that.)

Blaming doesn’t get very far, and cursing even less distance. I look for nitty-gritty “what can we do to change this?” solutions. This is why I now work as a private tutor, for people who want their kid to learn and have dug up the money to do something real.

Anitya is right, NO teacher has a guaranteed job. Far less than most factory workers; factory workers are protected by the contract the minute they walk in the door, but teachers are **on probation for two full years** And as Anitya pointed out, many systems have a revolving door of firing new teachers so they don’t have to give them contractual protection. Then after the two years, al you have is a copntract that lets them fire you any time they’re overstaffed, change the program, or catch you saying one word out of place. Some guarantee!
As far as cursing teachers for the supposed short work day and the supposed long vacation — neither really true at all, at least for the large majority of teachers who really do their jobs — I make the standard offer that I made as a teacher: OK folks, put your money where your mouth is. Take my job for a week and I’ll take yours.Nearly every high school and junior high in the country is desperate for more substitute teachers, especially in urban areas. There is supposedly a shortage of math teachers out there. There is definitely a shortage of special ed teachers, and forget finding subs who will work in special ed. Go to your nearest city, sign up as a sub, and spend a week or two in the job. Then come back to me and talk about how easy it is. You won’t even think of it? Scared to walk in and talk to a class of thiirty strange and hostile people? Well, then, you have no right to criticize.

Well… The guys out in Washington State who work for the trucking freight company which shut for good yesterday are now having to look for a job now. (They had a Teamsters Contract). The public schools could never just leave you teachers in the cold with no notice !!! I think one must revaluate their thinking on this. Confess your crime !! As Mao used to say. Class struggle will win in the end. The public sector schools must give notice, not just the next morning, you get to the school and it is padlocked with an impersonal phone message telling you you are terminated today .

Well, yes they can. It has happened to me. Repeatedly.

I worked two years in one school. Due to a sudden decrease in the number of high school students (birth control had become legal fifteen years previously) and a prolonged strike that made a number of families leave town, bang, the school had to cut more than ten percent of staff. I got called into the office and told “you’re it!”. So did five other people. The subject I was teaching was dropped from the curriculum, bang, gone.

I worked two years at another school. Due to very complicated political/religious manoeuvering (Newfoundland in the 1970’s — very different laws), the school board was forced to build a second high school against the wishes of the parents, teachers, and students. The high school was split down the middle on religious lines, and both schools became junior-senior high schools. The junior high teachers in each division had more seniority than I did and took over half of my job each, and I got called into the office and told “goodbye.” So did several other people.

In both cases, if I had worked one day of the next year, I would have had *some* union protection. But in both cases I would have been fired anyway, because they had justification because of overstaffing and seniority. Being withing the first two years, however, I had no union protection whatsoever. Ask anyone in your factory if they would move to a new town and work on a job for two full years knowing that they can be fired overnight.

I took over another job in a very very remote location — a one-room school over a hundred miles from the nearest town and 120 from the central office. I like travel and adventure, thanks. The administration started by lying to me, telling me this was a new situation and there had never been a school there before. Actually, there had been one, operated by a different board. The other board had given up on the place as unmanageable and untenable after some very serious problems and had washed their hands of it — the kids could go to the school 30 miles down the road in the nearest village, homeschool, or leave their kids uneducated, whatever they wished. Some parents had petitioned the second board to take over. So I arrived and found after arrival that the place had gone through three teachers in less than two years, and a couple of them had not only been fired, they lost their teaching certificates.
Turns out there were some major feuds going on between the families, and anything you did that seemed to favour one kid, or anything else unpopular, would get you reprisals from the other family. Nothing life-threatening, but very unpleasant — door blocked by 100 pounds of concrete, kept awake all night by snowmobiles, etc. The majority of the kids made racial slurs and bullied two small kids from another family and half different ethnic group (and no, you will never guess which groups and who bullied whom). One entire family of five kids had learned to deal with the situation by withdrawing and not participating in anything at all. Also one kid was emotionally disturbed, spent all day locked in the bathroom until I was forced to lock it and hold onto the key, not a pleasant situation for all concerned. Turns out, I found from the grapevine, that he had accused a previous male teacher — truth or falsehood I do not know — of sexually molesting him, and that was how that teacher lost his certificate and career; no proof, no trustworthy witnesses, and no appeal.
One day some large men in suits appeared at the door of the classroom and handed me a sheet of papers for me to sign a resignation and leaned over me until I signed it. I held out for one month’s severance pay and got it, and kept my certificate, which in a place like that was a miracle.
(I found out later that they **closed the school for a month** yes it does happen, the noisiest (unfortunately, also smartest and most interesting) family moved out of the village and the teenage juvenile delinquent foster kid was placed somewhere else dropping the class size from 20 to 14, and they hired a married couple and paid both of them to re-open the place — so two people took on half the job that I had had.)

Anyway, next time you talk about “guaranteed” jobs for teachers, excuse me if I laugh hysterically.

If you’d like that cushy ten-month six-hour guaranteed job in a beautiful remote village, I’ll be very happy to send you the name to apply to — they’re always hiring! (Guess why)

Mamm:

In the U.S.A. Public schools in New York City and other cities/states it is very hard to get rid of teachers. Not to disappoint you, but no school district can tell a teacher who has tenure or a union behind them that your job is terminated immediately. So what’s your point:.

YES THEY CAN. I’ve said that, and a number of other teachers have agreed. What part of “Yes teachers DO get fired and we have been there” don’t you understand?
Tenure does NOT mean a guaranteed job, it only means the school board has to go through the same due process as every other company has to go through in order to fire someone.
If the school is overstaffed due to dropping enrollments, if the program is changed and the teacher’s subject is no longer being taught, if the state takes over the school for reasons of poor management, or for a number of other reasons, the school board can call teachers in and fire them. Usually these firings take place at the end of the school year in June and the warning meeting is in March or April, but not always. Contracts often have a time factor written in, in some cases thirty days warning, but this varies. In some cases the teacher can use seniority and bump a teacher at another school — who then gets fired — but not always. And a school board that really wants to get rid of someone can find ways to make them quit, like transferring them to a very undesirable or impossible place.
Non-tenured teachers, meaning all teachers with less than two complete years of unbroken experience in the *same* board, can be and are fired regularly, with no warning or reason necessary.
You say that it is very hard to fire teachers in New York — so tell me, why are all those long-term substitutes in so many classes and why do so many kids have several teachers over the course of a year? How is it that so many people teach for one or two years and then work in some other career? Sure, in many cases the board just forces them to resign or doesn’t renew their contracts, but let’s be honest that it’s just firing under a different name (and around here it means you get no unemployment insurance if you sign the resignation, but you never get another job if you’re fired, some choice.)
Sure, some teachers are good at playing politics and make it hard to fire them — but a few noisy cases that make the news are not the rank and file, as you should know in whatever business you are in.