This is how teaching is supposed to be

Lately I haven’t enjoyed teaching as much as I did at the ranch or teaching snowboarding lessons or even student teaching. This week I found out why.

We told the administration that we had too many kids and that made for too many papers to grade every day, too many formative assessments to keep track of, too many missed quizzes to keep track of, too many IEP’s and 504 (legal things to give accommodations to students) too keep track of, and too many conflicting IEP’s in the same classroom- one kid needs a silent testing area, one needs test read aloud, one needs music playing. I had classes with 40 students in them, if you’ve ever tried to get 40 twelve-year-olds to sit quietly after they’ve been to 6 other classes it’s nearly impossible.  I was recording the scores of 190 papers every day, grading 190 quizzes every Friday, grading 190 formative assessments every Thursday. Let me tell you, we need to bring penmanship back into the schools, parents were getting mad because if we couldn’t read it in about 30 seconds we just marked it wrong. But I did the math one day and actually graded a student’s paper that was extremely hard to read, it took me 20 minutes to grade one paper, so let’s times that by 190 students, that’s 63 hours I would spend on grading if I tried to read sloppy handwriting. That’s 63 hours of unpaid grading if we would just, as parents put it, ‘do our job’.  We explained this problem to the administration and told them that we had been putting in 12+ hour days to get everything done and they finally listened! They hired 2 more math teachers and now my biggest class size is 28!

This has been the best week of teaching ever! Do you know how much better you can teach when you only have 28 kids in a class? It’s amazing. We get so much more done and I can change the lesson according to the feedback you get from the students, classroom management is easier and it’s not as stressful knowing you only have to keep track of 28 students instead of 40. Now I teach 140ish students- I have graded all papers, wrote lesson plans, made up quiz retakes and been home by 5 every day this week. It’s been teaching bliss. This is how I imagined teaching would be.