Teaching is so easy

23rd September 2012

Post with 12 notes

Teaching is so easy

School is ridiculous. For all my administrator’s claims of wanting to help, he gives me strange contradictory messages. “Go the speed of the class.” “Speed up” “Don’t worry about what this class needs to know for the tests.” “Give them this test” “Don’t send students to the office for x reason” “Do send them for y reason(the reason the kid was actually sent to the office)”

Not to mention the bit that led to the speedup request- me reteaching algebra concepts that they should have known, but didn’t. His help was to suggest I reteach them using the exact same method I had been using to reteach them- except that he wanted me to play a movie I didn’t have and that they’ll ignore with someone else teaching them the same thing. The hell?

And some kid told me, as he was marching his disrespectful butt down to the office, that I could ‘go back to Africa.’

My feelings on that have ranged from irritation at his continued disrespect and bad attitude, to confusion at how that comment was supposed to make any sense, wondering whether he was aware of the racist connotations of that phrase(and in which case, why he was saying it to me?), and exasperation at this kid’s complete inability to grasp basic logic. They clearly need more math, if only to be able to come up with better retorts. Maybe if I explained that was one of the benefits…

All this, grading papers, mountains of reports to file, writing many of my own assignments/tests, angry special ed departments, and less than half the pay I could be making as an actuary for more than half the work. Whee!

Tagged: teaching math logic

Shades of Gray

Teaching is so easy