Teaching is valuable, crucial, fascinating work. Except, you know, when it isnāt. Most of my day is spent hanging out with amazing young people and, I hope, making a difference in their lives. However, other parts of my day are just pointless. Here are some ways teachers waste time every day.
1. Hunting down students to get their missing assignments
Why, why do I care more about your grade than you do?!
2. Writing the learning standard on the board
You know who reads it? An administrator doing an observation. Nobody else. Just them. (Or in Houston I.S.D.ās case, one of a fleet of district babysitters.)
In all my years of teaching, Iāve never had a kid ask about the standard on the board.
3. Responding to parent emails that a student could (and should) have asked
āI see that [my seventh grader] got an 80 on his test. Can we discuss what he missed and what he should work on?ā
āKayla told me she would like to switch seats. Can you move her to her friendsā table?ā
āWhat is going to be on Thursdayās test?ā
I need an email filter for this.
4. Doing constant IT troubleshooting for a class set of laptops for which we received no training, no additional compensation, and no additional IT support personnel at our school
Title is self-explanatory.
5. Creating separate lesson plans for students because of āparental rightsā
Cool, let me redesign my online breakout box because your family doesnāt believe in Wi-Fi. Iāll do that right after I make an entire unit for an alternative novel to Maus II because ā¦ rodent nudity.
6. Taking attendance
Listen, I know why attendance records matter. Iām just saying, technologically speaking itās 2023āis a teacher manually entering attendance for sometimes up to 40 kids at the beginning of every class really the best we can do?
7. Jumping through hoops when we need an administratorās help with a student
I once had an administrator who said to ānot even bother coming into [his office]ā if we didnāt have a list of 10 interventions weād exhausted first.
Sir, this is a school, not the Supreme Court.
8. Filling grading quotas
Like most teachers, I have to put in a certain number of grades per week. Some of those are big, meaningful assignments. Some are smaller, but no less important, tasks that ask students to reflect on their learning or check their understanding. And some are filler so I donāt get in trouble for not having enough grades. With these minimums, itās impossible not to give the occasional meaningless busywork that boosts the number of grades Iāve posted without really improving the kidsā learning or understanding.
9. Doing nearly anything with data
Entering it into a database. Analyzing it. Disaggregating it. Color-coding it. No.
Excel can do all of this. It always could. Our time would be much better spent talking about the implications of what Excel already did than trying to be Excel.
10. Enforcing the dress code
The justification is always āIf we sweat the small stuff, we wonāt have to worry about the big stuff,ā but thatās never been my experience. I just donāt care if a student in fifth period has fake nails. Could the nails potentially be dangerous? Maybe. But the back row of my class is passing around a jar of Nutella and eating it with their fingers, and I feel like thatās way more of a health hazard. I. Just. Do. Not. Care.
I love my job. I plan to teach at my current school at my current grade level until I eventually collapse in the hallway and nobody notices until rigor mortis starts to set in. But Iāll admit, I get a little frustrated when I miss lunchāagaināto do a reading-fluency probe that will give me information I already know, or when I get knocked down on an observation for rephrasing the standard on the board into language thatās comprehensible to my students.
Maybe someday the whole teaching process will be streamlined, and I can focus my attention on things that are really important. Until then, Iāll keep ignoring Joseās flip-flops, leave the same standard on the board for three weeks, and plug in each kidās average three times as a āparticipation gradeā when I realize I havenāt entered enough marks in my grade book for the week. I donāt think itās causing my kids too much suffering.
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