Treated like 💩- Part 2. What Does American Teaching Look Like?
A Hard Thing To Do
Teaching is hard work. For most of the people who do it, it’s fun, creative, and worthwhile work, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The fact that I have to state this upfront is already an indication of how bad teachers have it in America; many of their fellow citizens don’t think that the work they do is difficult. I’m only going to spend enough time on these people to note that they exist. Some of them are even elected government representatives who get a say about how teachers can teach. Crazy, right? Occasionally, in what follows, I’m going to pull from the kinds of arguments that these kinds of people make when they suggest that teachers have it easy.
But before I get into that, I don’t expect you to take my word for it. Let’s actually consider what goes into the job of teaching kids. To make this as easy as possible, let’s start by considering a hypothetical teacher who doesn’t do anything apart from what they are contractually obliged to do¹. We’ll call them the minimum viable teacher (MVT) The MVT arrives to work at something like 7AM every weekday. They will leave again at something like 3PM. They’re going to do this for 180–190 days of the year. While working, typically half of their day will be spent in a classroom helping students learn. The remaining time they have…
