10 Things Parents Just Don’t Understand About Teachers
I’ve eaten at hundreds of restaurants in my life, but I’ve never worked at one. My wife was a waitress in college, so when we go out to eat and I complain about something, she’s usually able to offer me a logical explanation. The table next to ours received their food first because they ordered soup and sandwiches and we ordered pizza. That family was seated ahead of ours because a table for four opened up, but there isn’t yet room for our party of six. The restaurant may appear sparsely populated, but our food could be taking a long time because there’s a backlog of take-out orders.
Until you do a job, you can’t appreciate all that goes into it. It’s this fact of life that accounts for many of the misconceptions parents have about teaching. So here are 10 things parents might not know.
We Have Less Control Over Things Than You Think We Do
The state adopts standards that we have to teach. The Board of Education approves programs that we’re required to use. The district’s administrators are under pressure to improve test scores, and that filters down to us. We may be “there for the kids,” but we’re also employees of our districts. So while we may want to teach your child other things and in other ways, we usually have less autonomy than you suspect. When you complain about our math program, you put us in a difficult position. We might very well agree with you, but saying so would be unprofessional.
We Do It All Ourselves
We don’t have office assistants. Any communication that comes home from us was typed by us. Because we have many urgent things to do, we likely typed that newsletter in ten minutes and read it over once before hitting print. If we make the same grammatical or spelling10 Things Parents Just Don't Understand About Teachers - Teacher Habits:
