Ten Things That Annoy You About Work

This should be cathartic, since we finished school last week. Here we go:

1. The Living Dead. Teachers who can’t remember why they chose teaching as a career need to pick up stakes and find another homestead.
2. Whining. The lengths to which kids will go to excuse their missing work are incredible.
3. Stuck on Stupid. Policies and people who don’t use actual logic or observation as their basis for advancement.
4. God’s Gifts to Education. Or so they think. You know, the teachers who have contempt for everyone’s class but their own, or the administrators who are convinced they have the one silver bullet that will change education as we know it, and they’re determined to fire it straight through your hardworkin’ heart.
5. Know-it-alls. Could apply to the students on occasion, but usually applies to folks outside our school who know nothing about it, but can pontificate about it at length. These people are usually rude and condescending and wouldn’t last ten minutes inside a real classroom, yet they seem to know exactly what I’m doing wrong and what I ought to be doing instead. Problem exacerbated by large amounts of money.
6. Paperwork. Teaching would be so much easier if we weren’t buried under the avalanche of forms, reports, and data we’re supposed to be keeping track of. When the paper becomes more important than the pupils, we have a problem.
7. Grading. Separate from the paperwork, this is the bane of my school existence. I hate to grade papers. It’s tedious. It makes me sleepy. And at the end of it all, it tells me exactly what I knew already. Alas.
8. In-School Suspension. Not because we don’t need it, but because when a kid gets ISS, I get interrupted every damn day for that kid’s missing work. In essence, I have to stop teaching the kids who didn’t get in trouble to scramble up work for the kid who can’t stay out of trouble. This is backwards. Make ISS the most unpleasant bog on campus, and kids will work harder to stay out of it!!
9. Paychecks. They’re too small. I double-dog dare anyone who has a beef with what public schoolteachers are paid to come do my job for two weeks. After that, we’ll have a substantive discussion about how many hours teachers really work and whether the current remuneration schedule is adequate. To be nice, I won’t even get on my high horse about how most training is conducted after school hours on the teacher’s dime (the total opposite of the corporate world), or why teachers never get to “expense” anything.
10. Politics. This could be the subject of several rants, but I’ll be nice today. In short, schools are not your political footballs. Do not subject teachers and students to your short-sighted agendas to make points for your club against the other club. You just make more headaches for the teachers who are already working too hard for too little, and the kids are the ones who pay the price. If politicians really, really respected public education, they’d do two things: 1) Spend a great deal of time in actual schools doing substantive research and work, and 2) Listen to teachers who are currently in actual classrooms, not education “experts” and consultants who are paid very handsomely to reinforce the prejudices you already have.

Whew!! I feel better already. Happy summer, everyone!