Interview

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Home : 2001 : October : 20

Interview
By Inexperienced

1. Unlike most people, I feel things were bad on my first days and got better. At first I was just so unprepared for all the chaos of acclimating 65 fifth graders to the new routines and schedules. I had only been part
of classrooms that had already been functioning for quite some time, so all the routines and schedules were well-established. But in my class nobody could get anything right. I felt like there was something wrong with me because they didn't know where to put their papers, how to do assignments, or how to line up properly. But I worked hard and made some changes and called parents and

sacrificed much of my free time, and finally they got it together. Next year I will know that I need to be more patient the first few weeks, because eventually they'll learn the drill.

2. My biggest area of concern is how to help students who are so academically low. I have two out of three groups of fifth graders: the lowest group and the gifted cluster. We have to fill out loads of paperwork concerning how we will help the lowest kids, and of course I'm really interested in helping them. But I just don't know how. I feel as though a school that's so concerned with boosting test scores should have more of a curriculum in place to help boost these kids' scores. Other teachers have said that the problem is that some kids just don't listen to what you say. For about 50% of the low scorers, I feel like this is the case (the other half being language learners). But whatever the case, I have no idea how to help anybody. Especially frustrating is the fact that we are frequently interrupted. It seems not a day goes by that we don't have art, music, an assembly, a field trip, a guest speaker roving around campus, some major time-consuming administrative task, etc., etc., etc. And I am ALL FOR art and music, but it just seems like a school that wants/needs to boost scores so badly maybe cannot afford to be spending so much time on other activities. I hate that it's like that, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

3. In terms of tangible resources available to me, there isn't much provided by the school. I'm already over my copying budget six weeks into the year. Laminating is limited. In the book department we do okay, but in the technology department we're behind the times. No Internet access at school, five-year-old computers, a VCR that needs to be shared. As for support from people, I think I do okay, though the formal mentoring system is a joke and just generates more paperwork. Fortunately there are a lot of helpful people at school, and I feel very lucky in that department. Books you buy are very good too, but I seem to never have time to get to the fun activities from them.

4. My view of administrative support is that this term is an oxymoron. At my school the principal is very nit-picky of the new teachers. He has a "my way or the highway" attitude, down to the smallest little detail of your classroom. He blames me for the shortcomings of my students, which really upset me because his criticism lead me to be extra tough on a student who wasn't pulling her weight in this whole educational relationship. Then I came to find that she has a horrible home life and that I should have had more compassion. The teacher next door and I agree that we should have more support from the principal so that we can focus on the important people in the school, the needy kids, instead of turning everything into teacher-bashing and making the focus teachers' egos instead of kids' needs.

5. Things they didn't teach you in college:
Oddly enough, the percentage of time the college spent on teaching you about certain things is not proportional to the percentage of time you actually spend doing these things. That is, they spent very little time teaching you about the things you spend a very lot of time doing. Mainly what I'm referring to here is paperwork. I had NO IDEA how much paperwork there would be. There's a form for everything. Want to get a kid into reading intervention/counseling/tutoring/homework club/music/basketball? There's a form for it. You have to fill out forms about your goals, forms with your personal data, surveys about EVERYTHING. There's a form about special ed students, gifted students, and language learners. It's like ever since everybody got computers to generate all these forms and keep track of the data from them, it has become of the utmost importance to know tons more stuff. Another thing you spend a lot of time doing that they NEVER talked about in college is going to meetings. Fortunately my school has elected to provide a lot of things that would have been discussed at meetings into written memos, yet we STILL end up sitting there forever discussing things that seem so unimportant. Some people just need to talk about how they feel about EVERY issue, and none of it seems important to me. In contrast, college spent A LOT of time discussing lesson plans ... the seven-step lesson plan, teaching to multiple intelligences, Bloom's taxonomy. I find I get my lesson plans done in about ten minutes each day. I feel very bad about this, but I just don't have the time after filling out all these forms and going to meetings.

I also like what somebody else said about worksheets. College had an anti-worksheet agenda, but let's face it ... a lot of it is worksheets. And this doesn't seem to be a problem. Kids accept them, parents love them. As I said, I would love to plan the wonderful, hands-on, multiple-intelligence curriculum, but when you've spent 90 minutes in a meeting and 30 minutes cleaning up and documenting events of the day, and then it's 4:30 and you check your mailbox and find MORE papers you have to fill out ... you realize that you have no idea what you're doing the next day ... that's when the worksheet becomes your new best friend. Sometimes I wish the powers that be would realize that all their paperwork and meetings, which are designed to improve education, are actually very detrimental to the educational process because they take away from the time you could be spending planning meaningful lessons.

But on a positive note (as a question such as "What didn't they prepare you for" seems to inherently generate venting), I did feel well-prepared for the actual teaching part, as minimal an amount of time as it ironically seems sometimes. I felt prepared for classroom management, though not prepared to spend so much time on it. I think the fairest thing to say is that school could not possibly prepare you for the lowest lows of the job ... the days when the kids are so out-of-control that you have to remind yourself that you are the teacher and CAN control them, the hopeless crying, the day you find out out about your kids' home lives, the harassing parent, the time everybody fails the spelling test. But school could never prepare you for the highest highs either ... the cute school play, the parent who says, "I'm so glad so-and-so is in your class," the day the kid who never ever turned in one assignment does her homework. And for all the days I go home exhausted and upset and at the top of my "Wanting-to-Quit-O-Meter," the good days (though fewer in number) when you are crying for joy and saying, "Nobody ever told me it would be this wonderful," seem to make up for all the other crap.