No seriously, I do love my job. Really, I do.

apologizing in advance for typos-I hate proofreading. Before proceding on this blog post please note that I place no blame of the stresses associated with my job on any particular person or dept. It is the way it is-and we all have to deal with what is handed to us. I love the people I work with and work for and am thankful for those co-workers, classified and certified, that make my school a great place to work.
Just want to give some people a perspective on what it is to be a teacher.

Today was mostly good. The kids were decently behaved today, I had a pretty pleasant work day and a great time at zumba tonight. However, my stack of papers is growing and I hate grading so I avoid it like the plague. I have an entire weeks worth of papers to grade still. It is sad that I still have my last week's reading and spelling tests only half graded and we are taking this week's tests tomorrow. UGH!

I recently was asked by more than one person, "What do you do that you stay so late all the time?"

This job, for those that don't understand, is very demanding. We have a list of people to please on a daily basis that includes, but is not limited to; apprx. 28 students, their parents, their step parents or alternative families, our co-workers, our administration, academic services dept., speech dept proffessionals, reading coaches, district office reps...the list goes on. We are pulled every which way and expected to achieve high scores and work over time every week with out any pay. Then we have observers several times weekly taking notes on our procedures and management skills as well as the way we teach our content. We have to supply our own tools for our jobs which includes, file folders, manipulatives for math and lang arts, copy paper (occasionally), and numerous other odds and ends things that should be supplied for us! We share our kids with multiple departments and they spend half of their time in multiple classrooms with multiple people and when they do well we share the credit, but when they do poorly we take the burden on ourselves and it could cost us our jobs that we don't get paid much to do anyway. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do, but it gets trying dealing with the 'politics' of it all. We are constantly asked our opinions on matters that have already been decided upon mostly by people that have not been in a classroom in years or ever. We are told we have to have uninterrrupted amounts of lang arts time and then they pull random kids out for other services. They also tell us to push math now, and want to use our alotted 'uninterrupted' reading time for it...AAAHHHHHH make up your minds! Then we have papers to grade, lessons to plan, units to theme and just when we do it in the requested format-they change it. We are given programs and not trained on them. We are told to not teach to the test, but are looking at performance pay. We have weekends off-except that we don't. Oh, and summers-forget it! We stay at work to clean up our classrooms for a week after and go back to set them up several weeks early.
In short-teachers f'ing rock! Find one, hug them (or not, I am not a fan of close proximity with strangers) and thank them for their dedication. Then slip them a twenty-trust me, they need it.