What teachers REALLY want
What teachers REALLY want
Welcome to National Teacher Appreciation Week. I looked under my pillow to see if the Tooth Fairy left me something. Nope. Checked the fireplace to see if Santa had been there? Zip. Maybe a piñata filled with sweet surprises? Nada.
Ok. Maybe we didn’t ask. You don’t get what you wish for. You’ve got to let people know what you want. We did that. We asked teachers all over the country what they wanted, so jot this down so you know what to leave under the tree for next year.
1. They want people to trust them. Teachers want to be held to high standards (which has nothing whatsoever to do with a standardized test.)They want the responsibility and the authority to collaborate with their colleagues and design instruction that interests their students and nurtures the whole child, mind, body and character.
2. They want an end to the financial waste, corrupting influence and brain-eating-zombie-like devotion to standardized tests. Because. It’s. Stupid.
3. They want to be paid more than a great supplemental income. They want to quit that second job in the Sears lingerie department and make a decent living doing the one job they love: Teaching.
4. They want to sentence the next politician who bloviates that “class size doesn’t matter” to one year at hard labor, chained to a fifth grader’s desk in the middle of a class of 39 (Which happens to be the size of one of my fifth grades the year I questioned whether I wanted to continue being a teacher.)
It’s not that long a list. It’s not a pony and a castle and a trip to the moon. But