I am exhausted. Today was one of those days that just wears you out and makes me consider bed as a good option at 8:30. This week has been tough anyway with the adjustment of coming back to work from vacation, but somehow Friday is right around the corner. The reason that I am so exhausted is that I left work at 3 pm to go get all the materials that I need for tomorrow's lesson. In this lesson I am teaching about gravitational fields, and saw a great demonstration one time with a simple hula hoop and some spandex fabric. So, since the science department is broke at our school, I went out into the world and found hula hoops and the fabric. I ran to several different places as no one place had everything that I needed. I ended up getting home at 7:15.What I failed to mention in my first post was the amount of outside work that a teacher puts into their job. I am always looking to make things better, and as some of you that read this are aware, I can be a little bit of a perfectionist with some things. I spend and research hours trying to prepare the best lesson that I can, which most of the time requires me to be creative with the resources that I have. There is nothing more challenging then trying to find the best way to demonstrate why planets orbit a star or any other concept to a bunch of kids that have never really been exposed to it before.
I have a friend who teacher English that spends most of her time creating really innovative lessons. She has a Masters in curriculum development and excels at creating things that I would even like to do. Her last really cool lesson was a comic book to summarize the opening letters of Frankenstein. She incorporates film and music into her lessons on a regular basis. She is really good at what she does. I am not as inventive but feel just as determined to give the kids the best bang for their parent's dollar. Afterall the parents are paying us to teach their child something useful, it might as well be educational and fun for all involved. She comes up with these cool lessons, and other friends that I have that work themselves to the bone for Yearbook or for Math UIL. These are dedicated people, but these teachers are worried about their jobs. The government has decided that it needs to pull funding, and because of teacher's contracts only the tenured teachers are safe. The younger teachers, the teachers that spend hours trying to get everything to work after school and stay late for tutorials, are the ones on the chopping block.
I came into education to make a difference. To provide a civil service, but also to give that one kid a spark that says that he or she likes Science and could see themselves in it as a career. We have all had a good teacher that has impacted us in our life. I have had several that have stuck out, including a young government teacher that allowed me to step outside the box for my projects. He embraced creativity and made government fun.
Think for a second about the teacher that made the most difference in your life. Did that teacher make an impact on you and how you felt about school? I am not saying that I am a great teacher, by no means do I qualify to say that, but I am saying that I have the drive to be a good one. My friend that is an English teacher is a good teacher, and is on her way to greatness. She needs the security of knowing that her job is safe. Lessons are hard to write. They require work and a little effort outside of the normal school day. Some teachers don't bother. Some feel that the lesson they taught for the last 5 years is good enough, or a simple 5 minutes before class starts is all you need. For me, and for others, it is the strive to get perfection that will motivate us to always change our lesson and make it better. If the younger teachers that have that drive go, who will bring that determination and that passion into the classroom?
Thanks for Reading, and have a good night
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt
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