Do you like your Job?

An eighth grader asked me, “Do you like your job?”  I guess she saw the dissatisfaction that was painfully apparent on my face. It’s very hard for me to lie, and (that particular day) I did not like my job. It was not something I aspired to be and instead it was something I found myself doing to avoid unemployment and the depression that would inevitably take place in between going to college and mourning the loss of one of my parents who recently died. I wasn’t going to pour out my heart to this 14 year old child.

Instead I said “sometimes”. The adolescent went further to say “why don’t you get another job?” I told her I was completing my college degree. She then went further to say, “is this like volunteer work?” She had no idea the way the world worked.

As a full-time college student you must take a minimum of 12 hours to maintain financial aid and scholarships if you have any with that requirement. I did. 12 hours is generally four classes. I was taking four classes and trying to make ends meet financially while emotionally I should have been allowed to take an hiatus because I was dealing with grief amongst other things. I had a degree to finish and needed a job, but I was not yet a holder of anything more than a college diploma and almost graduate with two almost Bachelor’s Degrees does not equal employable when compared against graduates with more experience.

Substitute teaching is a career opportunity that at the very least has flexible hours and if teaching is a prospective profession someone is considering then it can give you a window into the world of teaching. There are great conversations that can be had with teachers who have been teaching for ten, fifteen, or even twenty years.

I have spoken to teachers who have taught for a decade and are tired of doing it. I have spoken to teachers who find it hard to leave the profession when they have been doing it for fifteen years. Some educators have told me that they love to teach but what is most distressing is that they are told what they have to teach in order for students to moderately pass state wide tests instead of what the teachers want to teach.

This is the true issues public schools face in poor districts. Students are geared toward passing mandated tests but when the students don’t perform as well as expected the instruction in the classroom is geared entirely toward passing that mandated tests. Students find this tedious and miss out on learned some of the more advanced material they need to learn in an Language Arts class for example. This is why most teachers in the particular state I am in are against this state mandated test.

The state mandated tests at minimum tests the students on what they should know already but it in no way prepares them for other tests they need to get into college like the SATs. Truth is most students in public schools are being taught the minimum of what they should know. Some students have already decided that school disinterests them altogether.

I have been in classrooms where students who should be juniors in high school are still in the 9^th grade and don’t want to go to college. They pretend in front of their peers that they don’t want to go to college but even I see that what they really mean is that they don’t believe they have the potential to go to college and do well so they don’t think they should even try. Sadly it generally takes more than one person to let a student know they have the potential they just need the ambition.

I blame the parents. Some parents don’t care about their child’s education so even they can’t be surprised when their son/daughter drops out of school or becomes pregnant before finishing middle school.

The molding begins form childhood. You can’t talk to a 17 year old and tell him he needs to read more so he can pass high school when he never liked to read and his mother never once picked up a book and he never saw her pick up one either and read one herself. Children have looked me in the eyes and told me that they hate to read. We live in a society where the accessibility of a summary of almost any novel can be googled and that same novel has probably been adapted to film about three times in that last few years lacking true literary continuity.

The mass-produced instant delivery world we live in has taken so much from education. If you watch the news you would believe the economy is the greatest tragedy, but I believe the crisis in education is the greatest calamity of current times.

I’ve sat in classrooms where students who had an assignment sat there and ignored it. Students were willing to sit for an hour and vocalize how boring class was when they had an assignment but chose not to do it. Students sat at their desks toward at the end of the semester unable to complete a simple math quiz with very basic algebraic questions because they didn’t pay attention all year to their teachers’ lectures or was suspended most of the semester for disorderly behavior.

The same student who asked me if I liked my job went on to tell me about how students and teachers at private schools were arrogant. Having attended bother public and private schools she told me that at private school she was basically graded more critically and didn’t do as well compared to her A’s and B’s in public school. This she thought was a plus for public schools. What she failed to realize is that it is never about grades but about what you learn. In private schools students generally seem to learn because it is considered a privilege to be there. Parents either pay for their children to attend or apply for stipends so it isn’t just something you lapse into and parents who choose private education for their children know it and I am sure let them know it. Teachers are also held to a higher regard. In a public school kids generally don’t know how privileged they are to receive an education considering on the other side of the world learning is a novelty some cannot afford at all. Teachers cant teach what they want to because they are bound by a guideline of what they must teach to pass a mandated test and on top of it they have some students who are behind but were unfortunately passed to the next grade although they should have been left behind.

I have sympathy for teachers to a strong degree, but at the same time the teachers who ignore the student in the back who is asking for help is someone who I despise. Teachers who ask other students to grade each others' papers in an effort to cut down on their work load is ridiculous. I started to grade a classes quizzes, but after a long day of being talked back to or ignored and trying to keep a class in line that I did not sign up to teach (when I was moved from my original assignment after lack of subs) to a teacher who failed to leave behind lesson plans I decided this was their teachers’ job not mine.

There are good days like then substituting for kinder classes where children are eager to learn, and actually miss you when you leave. It is difficult to hear five or six if not more voices of small children calling your name asking you for help or permission to do something but it is rewarding when you can actually teach them something.