On Teaching
15 March 2025 ed. 17 March 2025 ed. 20 March 2025 ed. 28 March 2025
I have signed my letter of Intent to Return for the 2025-2026 school year.
Having said that, I have some serious hesitations about that decision.
Here is a list of my hesitations, in list form, (for concision and clarity purposes).
Pros
I love teaching.
Most of our students are genuinely good people.
Most of our teachers care deeply about their students.
Our academies seem to be giving students more and better choices for their futures.
I have met and taught some of the greatest people I know, starting with Day One of the initial opening of our building 23 years ago.
Cons
Because of the nature of my job, and the school district’s decision to use google classroom for assignments, I am staring at a screen most of the day, which has caused my macular degeneration to escalate quickly.
During the eight hours of my day, I am bound to my classroom most of that time. I do not have time to move, so my physical health continues to deteriorate.
In 22 years at my current position, I have never had access to a window in my classroom, so I often don’t see the sun for 8 hours. This affects my mental health, as it does to every other teacher with similar classroom conditions.
As a teacher of English, the onus of teaching our students to read and write falls mostly on the English Department. Most of my grading takes place at home, on nights and weekends and even Spring Break, because of the lack of time during the day. (Some students’ teachers don’t grade or post assignments, so students have no idea what their grade is (for them, today) in any given course, in all curricular areas).
Eliminating Honors-Level Classes has created a large problem with discrepancies between on-level and AP-level student abilities in the classroom, so the failure rate in AP Language is higher than any other year, but my expectations of the quality of their work has had to be consistently lowered, just to accommodate the inability of some students to (literally) read and write.
I contact parents and administration and counselors when students start falling badly behind, and there is hollow follow-through in most cases.
Our junior class had COVID hit them in between 6th grade and junior high, which drastically affected their academic and social abilities. Some of my AP English students have never read a book assigned to them in an English Class (and yet they earned a good or passing grade), a fact of which some students are quite proud.
Some teachers of English (and other core areas) simply outsource their “teaching” to pre-made videos, AI grading tools, and audiobooks played aloud in class, which has harmed the integrity of our students’ education.
Teacher morale cannot be fixed by a weekly newsletter, outsourced from twitter and facebook reels.
Student morale (and their achievement on the ACT) cannot be outsourced to an email, which students interpreted as “shaming” them into getting higher ACT scores, just so we can “beat” other districts.
Most colleges do not even require the ACT. My school feeds the College Board with taxpayer/school money with AP fines, ACT, and pre-ACT,.
Teachers should not have to give up their plan period to learn about the new rules which the College Board has decided to impose on our upcoming (mandatory) ACT testing of all juniors.
Our students feel constantly monitored (even if they have done nothing wrong), so they feel no ownership of their own school building and grounds.
The racism within our student body is aggressive and pervasive. Students who go to administrators or counselors to report this racism feel as though nothing is being done, so those targeted students simply endure the slurs and try to carry on.
Central Office Curriculum-Writing meetings take teachers out of their classrooms, to create curricular content, which is immediately owned by the school district and Google, but teachers are not compensated for their creation of “communal” curriculum.
Public Schools offer no incentive to do a job “better”; every teacher at their pay grade gets the same pay, regardless of effort. Every other professional-level job rewards employee performance, but in schools, a teacher can “take tickets” at an athletic event or offer to “teach” Night School (etc).
Paraprofessionals should have access to aforementioned “job offerings”. Secretaries/paras are subject to different days/hours as teachers, so they should be able to work for school events (where employees already work and are trusted) and get compensated at their agreed-upon hourly wage.
Forcing part-time employees to contribute to a Retirement Fund for retired staff is unfair and inequitable.
Every surrounding and competitive school district pays their teachers more than mine.
Our new attendance policy has ensured that students who are visibly and contagiously ill are being forced to come to school, against common sense. Parents feel they are forced to make their sick children come to “learn”, but students can’t learn if they can barely stay awake. (And parents get a different “shame” letter about attendance.)
According to my tax information, I earned almost $2,000 less this year than I did last year.
Students who are failing classes should not be able to participate in their activities (specifically, this year, Show Choir and Speech are the most problematic).
Parents should not dictate curriculum, unless they use the (long-established) system of proffering a different text for their child.
Inservice Days are supposed to be a day for teachers to have access to Professional Development and time, but the meetings are often focused on basic skills every teacher should already know. Inservice Days should focus on other tech skills or requirements, not “in-room work hours” to satisfy arbitrary contract hours and have teachers be mandated to stay in the building, rather than working from home, unlike most neighboring districts.
Professional Development is important, but teachers need more access to self-paced courses, since those hours must be completed outside school hours.
CPR should be a (free) required Professional Development credit for all staff.
Communication about required courses should be completely transparent and accessible, and suicide/abuse training should count as PD hours.
My district's teacher pay is embarrassingly subpar, compared to surrounding districts, with whom we compete.
Teachers in my district who are at 2 or 4 years of service are offered “retention bonuses”, but there is no such bonus for devoting 20+ years.
Not only was pay frozen for four years during my tenure, apparently my “number of years served” was also frozen, so rather than meeting the rules of 85 next year, apparently I have 5 more years.
Many people in the Central Office refuse to provide basic information when teachers require assistance.
Once again, I do not get paid for the countless hours I work outside of contract hours, but I am forced to take personal leave if I don’t want to sit in my classroom for 4 hours during an Inservice Day.
Too many times, administration does not reply to emails, leaving teachers and staff with unanswered questions and unclear directives.
Our immigrant children (and their families) … please tell us what to do. Please tell our staff what to say, to protect our community.
This list goes on and on. I can’t even write everything which needs improvement in our school and our district. We should not be trying to copy other districts; we should be the standard (again) which other districts want to meet and exceed.
Ask yourself: why do we have a football coach who gets paid my English-teacher pay, but he only “oversees” APEX -and does NOT teach English courses - a job which could be done by many of our classified staff?
Ask yourself: What happened to this school, and what are we going to do to fix it?
If the answer is “nothing”, then I am embarrassed for my place of employment and would like to tender my resignation and rescind my Letter of Intent to Return.
If we can work together, making this school amazing again, I will happily return, based on whatever proposal you have to improve the education of our student body, the mental and physical health of our teachers and staff, and to progressively make education its best form. (My guess is that you don’t care enough to retain qualified staff, so you will ignore most - if not all - of what is in this letter.)
Sincerely …
