Work

I have three potentially full-time jobs. (1) Taking diverse and uneven resources and within the bounds of (a) state frameworks, (b) school- and (c) district-level requirements making a curriculum with daily lessons; (2) using this creation to teach kids every day, and to work with them however they need it, including after-school activities and tutoring; and (3) devising methods for collecting data on their progress, collecting that data, analyzing it, and using it in the performance of (1) and (2).

Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.

I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.

But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.

4 January 2010, 1am
Education, Teachering