Stress, teachers strive to end year strong
Photo Credit: Karen Cardwell
Kaylee Smith, Managing-Editor
May 4, 2012
Filed under Opinions, Top Stories
By this time in the school year, students are extremely tempted to “check-out” of anything pertaining to work. They would be just fine with showing up and sleeping throughout the day, or at least not participating in class. But, for some teachers, this is crunch time. They must pack everything they can into these last few weeks, hoping that they can checkoff the final lessons of their curriculum.
Our classes are jam-packed with lessons, lectures, projects and assignments. Teachers are piling on the workload, and the stereotype of “coasting” through the end of the year is no longer a possibility.
We find ourselves taking tests when we’re not prepared, and this is of course is reflected in our grades. Is it a fair representation of what we know when the teachers aren’t spending the necessary amount of time teaching just because they have an agenda to complete?
Photo by Karen Cardwell.
Surely when kids that have consistently scored well throughout the year, start to struggle in the class, someone would notice, right? Wrong. This has been a reoccurring issue from year to year, and we, as students, begin to expect this end of school stress.
Teachers, it is your job to teach. When the majority of your students are not doing well on a subject, it is not a reflection of our work ethic. Give us a fair and reasonable workload and amount of time to complete it, just like what is expected throughout the rest of the year, and maybe do a better job of planning in the future. After all, we go to school a considerable amount of days over the required amount by the state, but that’s a different story…
Loading ...
I agree. I hate it when a teacher assigns TONS of homework that you work really hard on and it either never gets graded, or they start going through and skimming your essays or whatever and give you a very superficial grade to the assignment (in which the grade might as well be random) and then enter those random grades randomly into the grade book.
In the British Army, they began a tradition in the western world that the officers were to lead by example, and to work harder than all of their underlings. I have heard some stories from other classrooms and the sources say some teachers believe that their personal lives should take priority over grading anything (when in fact they have the majority struggling and have a mountain of work they need to grade). I totally would understand them taking some time off for themselves, just not so much that the mountain becomes so backed up that grades from January aren’t even in the book.
Plus I have always been raised to be a good worker and with good work ethics. My parents told me “When you have a job as an employee, and your boss asks you to come in on the day you’re off, you do it and you do it so well they’ll feel guilty for not promoting you, and then you ask what else can I do. If you don’t go above and beyond the call of duty on ANY job, what makes you deserve to have extra pay? Not to mention if you don’t come in, not only will you not deserve or have extra pay, but you will possibly be fired down the road for not even trying.” A job is a job is a job and a lot of kids are frustrated at some teachers for not grading our work just so they can have more time off as summer comes around.
[Reply]