Teachers Are Mad - But Not About Remote Learning

Photo by Estúdio Bloom on Unsplash

There’s been a ton of teacher complaints about remote learning since we went digital last school year. We’ve all seen the memes. We’ve read the tweets, watched the video clips, skimmed the threads on Facebook.

And with good reason. Teaching from behind a screen may be better than dawning PPD and keeping a six-foot bubble, but not by much. There are a lot of really terrible things about remote learning. To start:

• Kids are by nature kinesthetic learners. Remote learning is not.
• Kids surf the web and think we can’t see the reflection change the color of their faces.
• Microphones are always too loud or too quiet.
• Turning you camera off shouldn't count as being present in class
• Kids are getting up for snacks all the time
• Kids take a walk in the middle of a lesson
• There’s a ton of hidden moments in a day where you’d normally build rapport that have all just disappeared.
  

And so on.

But it’s my theory that teachers are not complaining about the online learning - not really. The truth is that as teachers, our grievances go much deeper. It’s more like, we’re complaining about the cumulative assault of being overworked, undervalued, and underpaid that has carried on for decades. It’s just parading as frustrations about online learning right now.

I was a teacher in public schools for four years - I left to pursue my masters, and thanks to a little bit of terrible timing, managed to graduate into a historic hellfire of a combination pandemic & recession. I still teach on the side while I blog, but I don’t have a horse in the race anymore like public school teachers do.

But I can speak from experience and say that most things about teaching in a public school setting are totally bogus. Teaching is my lifeblood, but: we are subject to chancellor demands of curricular changes, must ensure that all of our lessons are sufficiently rigorous, bound to canny social-emotional learning buy-ins, required to implement a carousel of trendy silver-bullet pedagogies, and admin are usually as unhelpful as they think they are helpful - that’s all before you even get a chance to teach your kids.

Historically, teachers have never been treated terribly well. There’s never been any particular respect to the profession; not culturally. Teachers are paid less than their professional counterparts, their federal budget is severely and consistently cut, and the 10-day fever pitch back in March where everybody on social media decided that teachers deserve to be paid like kings really just displays that there’s dearth of voices who believe it when it’s not #trending.

So to explain to the non-teachers out there who don’t quite understand the whole to-do, here are a few reasons why teaching sucks so bad and we’re all mad about online learning.

Teacher Training Is a Mess

There doesn’t seem to be a particular consensus about what credentials are required to be a teacher. A lot of states demand a typical four-year degree at an accredited university, paired with a state-specific praxis. As a general rule, this lasts for a few years, until teachers are required to have finished their masters so they can stay in the classroom (Wondering if the requirement is a good investment of your time and money? Not unless you’re in it for the long haul!).

However, there are a few routes to alternative certification that require much less. Teach For America signs on anybody with a bachelor’s degree - regardless of their area of expertise. As a corps member, you participate in a few weeks of summer training, and then are placed in front of a classroom - and chances are high that your classroom will be in one of the more depressed and disadvantaged urban areas in the country.

Which like, if the gods on high decide that the teaching profession does not require 4 - 6 years, fine. Then just don’t make the rest of us commit our time and money to it.

Flimsy criteria for being a teacher undermines the hard work that many of us have dedicated to our professional aspirations. It's bad for morale.

Pay Is Not Great

Teachers with their masters are paid about 20% less than their professional others with their graduate degree. Teacher salaries across the country average just $59,000 a year.

In 2018, teachers over in Oklahoma were bringing home on average only $39k a year.

To provide you a frame of reference, research was done in 2010 that showed that a positive life evaluation costs an annual salary of $86,000. That’s $102,000 today when accounting for inflation.

Teachers don’t even come close.

Teacher Workload

As education activist Nicholas Ferroni tweeted, “...if teachers and school staff only worked their contractual hours, only fulfilled their contractual duties and only used the resources their schools provided...Society would temporarily collapse, the exploitation of teachers and staff would be exposed.”

What are we so busy doing? Teacher responsibilities generally include writing curriculum, inventing and creating learning materials, differentiating lessons, drawing up assessment, building social contracts, aligning state standards, instilling strong moral values and critical thinking skills, and so on. All in a day’s work.

Teachers report working an average of 54.4 hours a week - more than 12 unpaid hours a week, on average. As it turns out, the only other job whose unpaid overtime commitment is greater than that of a teacher is a Chief Executive.

At least pay is roughly the same, right?

A majority of teachers also express that they struggle to find a healthy work/life balance. In 2017, it was reported that two thirds of the teachers leave the field in the first five years. Two thirds! (And they wonder why we have such a severe teacher retention issue…)

A quick Google Search of “teacher workload” will bring up a collection of strategies and tips to help you reduce your professional responsibilities. As in, the tireless teacher workload is so banal and acceptable as a cultural inevitability that Google turns up helpful hints to manage it instead of proposals of systemic change. As though it’s our fault the workload is so big.

In what other profession are people sworn to "neoliberal toxic positivity" for such little pay and a patronizing celebration of our apparent nobility?

Teachers Are Not Vocational Heroes

I love teaching. I love it more than I love almost anything else. I love the lightbulb moments you get to provoke in kids, being a role in a student’s growth, imparting wisdom, watching students find their passion and confidence and voice.

But I hate it when people get me bathroom sink soap that looks like a pencil because “it’s teacher-y!”

Teaching is my job, it is not my identity.

Teachers are frequently lauded as vocational heroes. When teachers are regarded as vocational heroes, it reduces their integral pedagogical values to a projected belief of their nobility.

“Teaching is about the outcome and not the income” is a common byline that’s an apt example of this problem. Yes it’s true that we teach because we are driven by the impact we can make. But the narrative that we do not do it for the income grants forgiveness to those paying us paltry wages, and permission for them to continue doing so.

How about, “Teaching is about the outcome but also it shouldn’t come with a personal sacrifice so pay us more.” Has a nice ring to it, no?

* * * * * *

There's a lot we're mad about, and remote learning is just the last of it. What we'd like to see is a little consideration for the corps's professionals: work-life balance boundaries respected, a reduced workload, reasonable pay.

Maybe this way, we'd see a lot fewer articles contriving the brightside of online learning and a lot more conversation that challenges the deep systemic issues minimizing our profession.