It’s World Teacher Day! It’s great having a day totally devoted to teaching but imagine if it came with a gesture … or maybe 5:
1. From now on we are limiting your paperwork to manageable levels – Yearly planners, term planners, weekly planners, daily planners, Integrated planners – I go planner mad! I spend more time working on planners in a week than sleeping. And do the planners make me a better teacher? No way! If anything it makes it harder for me to find time to develop and prepare for the kind of engaging lessons my students need.
2. From now on you don’t have to halt your everyday teaching for every little new cause – Whenever something disturbing happens in society the reaction always seems to be , “All we need to do is educate our children about it”. The result being, lessons on nutrition, resilience, anti-bullying, anti-gambling, anti-drugs, anti-smoking, responsible alcohol consumption, treatment of women, road safety, bike safety, cybersafety, stranger danger, first aid, body image, sex ed … and the list goes on and on. It’s not that these areas are not important. Far from it. It’s just that if you want me to cover these areas you should be excusing me for all the maths and science I haven’t been able to fit in.
3. From now on just the one staff meeting will suffice – One weekly staff meeting before school meeting and 2 after school weekly meetings is just too excessive. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking shop (this blog proves that), but I have a family. The best workplaces recognise that the home work balance is essential to being a good employee. Extra staff meetings are great for building stress among teachers, not results.
4. From now on we have decided to stop caring how colourful your classroom looks like – As I have admitted before, I would make a terrible interior decorator. For some reason some bosses are fixated with grand noticeboards and classy themed classroom designs that do little to showcase the childrens’ work and do more to showcase a teacher’s ego. What results is a competitiveness among the teachers to have the glitziest classroom, whilst hacks like me must settle for a rather large dose of ‘classroom envy’.
5. From now on we are scrapping kitchen clean-up duty – Can you imagine instructing one or two of your students to clean up the mess left by the entire class? Why on earth are we teaching our children to clean up after themselves but refuse to live by that philosophy ourselves? Here’s a novel idea. When a teacher decides to make a cup of coffee, that teacher and that teacher alone is responsible for making sure that he/she cleans up any mess made and washes the dirty mug once finished. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
Click on the link to read Teachers, Lay Down Your Guns
Click on the link to read 4 Ways to Identify a Great Teacher
Click on the link to read 3 Examples Why Robin Williams Would Have Made a Great Teacher
Click on the link to read Failure is Part of Success
Click on the link to read Apparently Cool Kids Really Do Finish Last
Topical Teaching 