Teaching from the Trenches

Teaching from the trenches

 De streaming of grade nine courses puts an increased burden and workload on teachers. All pilot schools had class sizes under 20. We now have 26 each at a minimum which flexes to 29-31 in each class. And these classes do not look like anything I have taught before. Why? Let me explain...

Our classes now include everyone, regardless of individual needs such as:

students with violence triggers, kids with LDs, on the autism spectrum, MID, gifted, opposition to authority syndrome, anxious depressives, not to mention the run of the mill everyday kid. Differentiated first each child is therefore compounded by putting them all together in large classes.

Many teachers I work with used to be in the business world before they started teaching later in life. They have all said separately that teaching is the only work environment they know of where management ask employees to do a lot of things and provide no real training or resources to do so. 

Furthermore, what makes teachers most effective is often experience, yet that experience is always being held in question. 

Crazy no? 

What if...

We had real TIME to do the things we need to do- but God forbid we have unstructured professional time during the day to make calls to parents, research new technologies that will benefit for our students, to grade, to have team meetings about kids at risk, to build programs for the most needy of students, etc.

Perhaps the biggest problem in education is that we undervalue the greatest resources it has: TEACHERS. 

And undervaluing teachers sets us all up for failure!