I Hate Teaching
Hello all! I know I have not updated this website in quite some time, but I promise it is for a good reason. If you know me personally you would know that in August I started working as an elementary school teacher! Woohoo! Now you may think that creating a website like this should be an instant disqualifier for becoming a teacher, and you may be right, but I think I'm doing a pretty alright job. However, lately it feels like the universe is working against me, so I want to use this blog as a way of getting out all of gripes and complaints in one nice spot. So where do I begin.
I think the best place to start off would be with the math curriculum, since it's undoubtably been the biggest headache I've dealt with this year. To explain, our school has been using a math curriculum called GoMath for about 13 years. If you asked me I would say it's been working out for our school pretty well, considering our students consistently score high on math in state tests. My curriculum director would disagree. About two weeks into the school year, when I had already been teaching with GoMath, they decided we were going to change the curriculum and do something entirely different. This totally blindiseded me. They had never let us know that they were even considering changing the math curriculum until it was already changed. On the bright side they at least were gonna do the teaching part for me, and I would get some student teaching experience.
However on our first day of using the new math curriculum we realized very quickly that it totally sucked ass. First of all, the curricul wasn't a book. You had to print out every single problem set and homework assignment rather than the students just taking them from a pre-existing book. This was a massive headache in two ways. For one it was just a shit ton of paper waste. Another thing is that you have to pass out the papers to each student, rather than them just getting it from their own book. This isn't a huge deal but it's just more of a hassle. The other reason the curriculum sucked is that it was just too simple. Or at least at first it was. It was like third grade level assignments. I felt like we were just wasting time teaching it. The first two days with the curriculum director and another teacher helping me did not go well in my opinion.
Another small piece of bullshit that pissed me off was about grades. Now I had been grading math assignments for two weeks at this point, and while it was a lot of work I was proud of what I was accomplishing. I was getting my papers graded every day before I left as to not have a huge backlog that would never get finished. And there were a lot of kids I had to grade for in math. there are 26 kids in one class and 14 in another. And everyday they would have homework due. I managed to stay on top of it and I was pretty proud of myself. However, the week before we started our new curriculum I opened my grading software to find that I couldn't access the math classes. I tried everything but for whatever reason my 5th and 6th grade math classes weren't showing up on the website. I had no idea why this was, but I figured it would at least be an excuse to not have to file grades for a bit. I would figure it out later. I eventually found out that my class grades had been reassigned to the teacher helping me out with teaching the new curriculum. We'll call her K for brevity's sake.
Going back to those first days with the curriculum director and K teaching the new math, I decided to ask K if she would be able to put in the math grades that I hadn't gotten to put in yet. This is when the curriculum director said:
"Oh about those grades you put in, we're gonna erase those since we're starting a new curriculum. We'll just say the first two weeks were for testing and start over"
What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What! What! WHAT! WHAT!! WHAT!!!!
I SPENT TWO WHOLE FUCKING WEEKS STAYING LATE MAKING SURE I GOT ALL THOSE PAPERS GRADED! AND YOU DECIDE TO TELL ME RIGHT NOW THAT IT'S JUST GONNA GO IN THE FUCKING TRASH?!?! WHAT THE FUCK CURRICULUM DIRECTOR?!?!
So I didn't let it show at the time, but this really fucking killed my mood for the day, and kinda for grading in general. Why grade anything if it's just gonna be fucking deleted in two weeks anyways? This on top of the math curricul sucking total ass basically soured me on it completely.
However there was good news. I wasn't the only one who hated the new curriculum. K also hated that shit, and after the Curiculum director stopped teaching it, K decided to just ignore what we were told and go back to GoMath anyways. K was a senior teacher working there and I felt safe that she would stand up for GoMath if the curriculum director protested. I'm going to start calling the curriculum director "CD" from now on.
So K brought us back to working on GoMath and basically did the class teaching for me for about two weeks. I was pretty glad with this situation. I technically wasn't the one not using the new math, since it was CD who put K in charge of my math class, so I wouldn't even be the one to get in trouble. However, this situation wouldn't last long.
Eventually the principal pulled me into her office to talk to me about a schedule change. We had a good talk about the schedule, but eventually she asked me about the new math curriculum. I tried to weasel my way around admitting that we weren't using it, but eventually I did. I'm new at the school and I don't want my next three contract years to be hell on earth. She told me that we need to start using it and how she would talk to K soon. The next day when we taught GoMath CD came by. She was visibly pissed at K. Before she left she told K to "see me in my office after this". After math K did go into CD's office, but CD never showed up, so K just left. K came back to me and told me about it, and I was mostly concerned about being forced to switch back to the shitty curriculum. If we switched it again I feel like my students would be even more fucked than they already were. We were about a month into school and we hadn't finished a single unit of math. K assured me she would try her best in the meeting, but I was weary.
Later in the day, before I sent my students to their music class, CD and the principal asked me to meet with them in their office. When I got there, I found out it was basically them trying to sell me on the new math curriculum. They went on and on about how awful GoMath is (which in my opinion it was working JUST FINE), and how it wasn't aligned to our state standards, and how this NEW curriculum is much more aligned to them. I eventually conceded and said we could teach the new curriculum, but I wasn't happy about it. I told CD that "I wish this was somethign we had figured out before the school year started". She gave a half hearted apology and said she would help me out with the new curriculum for a few days. Even though I was upset we were switching math for the third time this year, I was optimistic that the new math would be alright and that I would have people helping me.
The next week came and we staryed back where we left off on the new curriculum. CD taught the lessons for the first two days for me, and things went alright. The lessons were pretty simple. After Tuesday we had parent teacher conferences on Wednesday. On Thursday though, I would have to teach the new math curriculum on my own, without CD. And holy shit that was the worst math lesson of my teaching career (even though I've only been teaching a month).
The lesson was on Multiplying decimals by powers of ten. This would be alright but the thing about the new math is that unlike GoMath there are essentially no fucking example problems, and they dont tell you how to teach it at all. All you get are problem sets and group questions. They don't even have slides to go over. CD had to make the slides for me. So I was totally at a loss on how to even teach the fucking lesson. By the time I got to the problem set even the smartest kids in my class were confused. We spent the entire class fumbling around the classroom trying to help every kid catch up. Most students didn't even finish the problem set by the end of class. It was a fucking mess, and I was so upset.
Later in the day I was talking to another para about the lesson. She was curious about the lesson, because she thought that 5th graders hadn't even learned how to ADD decimals yet, much less multiply them. I looked up the 4th grade curriculum and she was right. There was basically nothing about even adding decimals in their book. So this new curriculum is expecting kids to just know things they have never been taught. I realized it was no wonder nobody in class got it. They didn't even have a bse foundation for decimals yet.
The next day we had a review day, to try to go over the lesson again and make sure everyone was able to get it. We got everyone to finish their problem set, but I'm still not sure everyone understands it. I guess we'll see on Monday. Thats when we start back up again.
So overall math class has been fucking hell on earth. If we continue having issues on Monday I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. At this point I don't even think we could switch curriculum again even if CD wanted to. These kids are just too far behind. We might have to just tough through this anyways. Not looking forward to it. At least on the bright side if these kids do shit on their state testing I can say it wasn't entirely my fault.
I was gonna complain about other shit in school but this math curriculum ended up takin up the whole rant. I think I'm gonna cut it off here for now. Tune in next week when I complain about how much I hate all of my students!