Why do we make teaching so hard?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting

2. Going to the bathroom is a hassle.

Student bathrooms are locked to prevent gang activity and smoking. When students want to go to the bathroom, they first have to get a key from the main office. The key is (surprise, surprise) often stolen. It’s not rare that students leave my room for twenty minutes to go to the bathroom only to come back and tell me they went to three different people in two different offices, and nobody had a key. Students are told by office staff that teachers have the key; teachers can open the bathroom for them. That’d be fine if it wasn’t an enormous liability for me to leave the rest of the class unattended during the school day. I could lend them my keys, but I bet they’d be stolen pretty quickly, too.

Then there’s the matter of the faculty bathroom. The only easily accessible bathrooms are on the first and second floor, but they’re student bathrooms. It is, of course, another liability for teachers to use them. Teachers are instructed to use the teacher bathroom on the other side of the building in the basement. This turns out to be quite the Double Dare challenge during the three-minute break we have to change classes (during which time we also have to move materials and cart textbooks from room to room, sometimes on different floors, which requires waiting for the elevator). Most teachers risk the liability.

3. Keeping classrooms clean and kids supervised is overwhelming.

Teachers travel from room to room at my school. In a rush to make it from one class to another, teachers forget to do a lot of things – e.g. take worksheets with them, make sure kids clean the inevitable mess they make on a daily basis, or lock the door. As a result, classrooms often look awful by the end of the day. I usually spend thirty minutes cleaning this up before I can ever start any work after school.

My class after four teachers
It’s a liability to leave students in classrooms by themselves. Anything they steal or break our administration has told us can be held against us, no matter what time of day it occurs. That sucks because there are non-teachers who use our classrooms. If I lock my door to keep kids out, I will inevitably be called away from a meeting later in the day to let the Bronx Arts people in, and because those people aren’t on staff, they don’t care so much about locking the door when they leave, especially since they don’t have a key. Teachers are also liable for leaving windows open. Kids might get electronics and weapons through them they couldn’t through the metal detectors.