Teachers have too many responsibilities
Educational leaders should take these things off their burners.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
End of the year, my child’s teacher was exhausted. She said it’s not from teaching, but from all the other responsibilities. How would it help teachers to remove some of these “other responsibilities” and just let them teach? What are some of those responsibilities?
It would make a big difference in teacher retention efforts. When asked why they left the classroom, most ex-teachers give pay and discipline as reasons 1 and 2 or vice versa. But number three is often the “other stuff” that is thrown onto teachers’ stovetops while the main course is already boiling over. Here are some things educational leaders could take off the burners.
• Being used as substitutes. Imagine it’s finally your planning period and you’ve got to finish tomorrow’s lesson, copy 100 papers, and grade yesterday’s quiz when they jerk you out of your room to cover a class where a substitute didn’t show up. For many teachers, this is a daily occurrence.
• Being a parent liaison. It’s one thing to talk with parents about their children’s progress, but it’s another thing to spend untold hours on issues that would be better conveyed by a principal, like disciplinary incidents, attendance concerns, failing courses, and rote positive comments.
• Being a media maven. Whose idea was it to make teachers communicate routine classroom details in cute little weekly newsletters that most parents immediately delete or ignore? Let’s find this person and retire them.
• Being community servants. Teachers are often required to chaperone extracurricular events, attend fundraisers, coach sports, sponsor clubs, and plan school ceremonies, all without compensation.
• Babysitting. Anything with “duty” in the title generally entails standing around making sure kids don’t kill each other. Think cafeteria duty, bus duty, and morning duty. Great use of your degree, eh?
• Playing audience for other staff members. In other words, meetings, meetings, meetings, usually heralded by coaches or administrators who don’t realize that every minute they hold you in a meeting is a minute carved out of your time to plan and prepare.
• Enforcing unnecessary rules. Even small rules can be important to maintain a positive and secure environment, but some rules seem to exist solely to make teachers administer punishments. Some that may qualify are wearing school IDs, forbidding the use of convenient doors and staircases, and mandating coats when it’s cold outside (how is this my responsibility?).
• Being the dog wagged by the tail. You’d think procedures about classroom technology and course content would fall under teachers’ jurisdiction. Usually, however, it’s the IT and Curriculum departments that set the arbitrary standards, costing teachers time, energy, and efficiency.
• Doing homework. Teachers are adults, and when they get home, they have adult responsibilities. They shouldn’t be expected to grade work, plan lessons, and answer emails.
• Being micromanaged. Requiring a lesson plan is fine (if you allow time to do it), but mandating that it be in a specific format including itemized peremptory elements is a waste of everyone’s sanity.
• Being constantly revolutionized. Some educational leaders change curricula, standards, and educational apps almost as often as they change socks. When it happens, they don’t want teachers to integrate the shiny new toys into an existing framework of success: they want you to burn down the bridge and build a new one. And a two-day training should be plenty of time to get that going, right? Wrong.
• Being a psychoanalyst. From Restorative Practices to SEL, the trend du jour is to make teachers double as mental health counselors — which is a bit like asking your mechanic, goldfish, or vacuum cleaner to double as a mental health counselor in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
I realize non-teachers will look at some of these things and say, “That doesn’t seem so unreasonable.” But consider them in aggregate, not in isolation, because the average teacher daily endures 80 percent of this list. Also, remember what a teacher’s job is supposed to be: educating children. That one task is sufficient to drive anyone to the edge. Pile on extraneous and unnecessary obligations, and don’t be surprised when teachers start falling off.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.