Evaluating Teachers is Hard Work

Apparently, it takes time to evaluate teachers. Who new knew?

And, there's no spell-check!

 

Who new? I don't no.

 

Well that's good.

We don't discuss teachers enough here.

 

They do God's work. And apparently, God's work only takes nine months out of the year and many four day weeks to complete.

 

As a teacher, I like having more frequent, more meaningful observations that give me worthwhile feedback. The twice-a-year preannounced dog and pony show was useless. That said, I have a great administrator who I trust. If I had a political asshole who's just looking for excuses to replace experienced teachers with cheaper younger ones, I'd feel differently. But I feel no sympathy for them bitching about how long meaningful evaluation takes. More fuel for my suspicion that bad administrators might be a bigger problem than bad teachers.

 

We all agree here, pretty much, that being a traveling baseball beat writer is the hardest gig in sportsdom.

And, if you include spring training, that's a nine-month season.

But if it only goes nine months how can covering baseball be so hard?

 

I know some writers who have covered all 162 games in a baseball season. It's not the norm, but it does happen. To do that, you're on the road for spring training and then you have your share of covering a game one night, flying out the next morning and high-tailing it to the stadium.

 

YF's fascination w teacher evals rivals any non-sport obsession I've seen from a poster here.

 

I really don't have anything against teachers, but I'm so sick of them acting like they're overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

My oldest's second-grade teacher used to be a lawyer, but became a teacher after her kids were born because she wanted to spend more time with them. She freely says the other teachers have no idea how good they have it.

My youngest's kindgergarten teacher is a very good teacher, but she goes out of her way to tell everyone how hard she works and comes across be like a puppy begging for praise.

 

The Times must be obsessed too.

 

Was a lawyer in a NY firm for 6 years, left about 8 years ago to teach. Took about a 65% paycut. While I got home later (about 6:00 vs. 8:30) and worked 12 months a year back then, I also started much later (8:00 vs. 9:30). I had a unusual position, but I almost never brought work home as a lawyer and only worked 3-4 weekends a year. When I was home, for the most part, I was done. Now, I'm never done. I work every night, I always have tests to write & to grade & programs to plan. I also work summers (sometimes part time, sometimes full time, sometimes temp legal work, sometimes teaching) to try to make up some of the money gap. The way I like to think of it is that had I stayed, I probably would have been laid off by now anyway.