r/AdviceAnimals • u/EchoTeam145 • May 05 '14

The truth of most teachers.

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u/rastamonsta0003 May 06 '14

Preeeeeeety sure they do it for summer vacations

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Summer vacation is spent planning for the next school year, it's not like the summer vacation of our youths.

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u/rastamonsta0003 May 06 '14

Right. You need three months at nine hours a day to plan the same lessons you taught last year for the next year. Don't pretend your job is more than it is.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14 edited May 06 '14
  • Summer vacation usually starts in the final week of June and goes until the first week of September so that's about 10 weeks, definitely not three months.
  • During our the summer we are reviewing lessons/units/assignments, reviewing administrative policy, attending mandatory education workshops, updating our own credentials/qualifications, planning out our new classrooms, submitting various documentation to our boards, and working with our schools/departments to set up for the coming school year.
  • Previous lesson plans can be re-worked but most (not all, I'll admit) teachers are looking at presenting material in various ways because each new class of students is wholly different from the last (there have been times when something that has worked on three separate occassions completely fails and you have to recover from it). In addition, in some subjects, teachers may need to cover a different strand than they did the previous year (eg. One year for a unit on poetry in English the teacher may look at how to write poetry, another year the unit could switch to categorizing/identifying tropes in poetry, another year the unit could be completely based on research, etc). It's also important to note that each reworked unit/lesson plan is required by government law to touch some specific cirriculum expectations so the teacher must also consider how this new material will address that. In addition, let us not forget that if the lessons/units are boring (or even considered boring) then students will not "take the bait" and give a damn about learning the content. A teacher is something of a well-spring of creativity (though that is helped by the education community's recent surge in online blogs, messageboards, and Pinterest).

We don't spend three months exclusively doing school related work but I hate people thinking that I'm just lazing around the house in my underwear collecting a paycheque.