Gone!

What would you make disappear from your job description?

As educators geared up for the current school year, NEA asked what they’d choose if they could magically make one thing disappear from their plates. Here are some of the ways your colleagues responded:

• Weekly faculty meetings that present information we could receive in a memo or email. Time is a commodity teachers value, and that meeting time could be used for grading, planning, or meeting with students.

• 10 students from each class. Lower class sizes would be amazing!!

• Mock testing and state testing.

• Get rid of new initiatives every year. Give us a few years to perfect the last initiative. We don’t want “the latest and greatest.” We want time to work on what works and best practices for our students.

• “Other duties as assigned” catch-all.

• The politicization of education.

• Student loans.

• Unnecessary meetings and repetitive paperwork. Also assigned periods just for the sake of filling a schedule (e.g. study hall, lunch duty, etc.).

• Filling out forms. All of them. Sub slips, extra duty time sheets, purchase orders, mileage reimbursements, questionnaires, career advancement credit approval forms, huge long SST forms, referral forms, grant writing, etc.

• All the extra work that comes from underfunded schools— having to buy so many things out of pocket, subbing on my planning period, doing the work of specialists we don’t have, taking work home.

• Submitting weekly lesson plans to administrators.

• Political groups pushing “indoctrination” narratives. To be clear, I am always happy to talk to a parent about anything they might be concerned about. But having outside groups pushing parents to be outraged about books and history topics is just exhausting and stressful.

• Income insecurity.

• The expectation we must do work before or after contract time. Unnecessary PD, meetings, and any kind of work that cannot be realistically completed during the contract hours. We don’t get paid enough if we have to work a second job to live.

• Fear of book challenges.

• Mandatory second and third jobs just to be able to live and still be a teacher.

• Phones.

• Subbing during my planning period.

• Working half the weekend.

• Constant staffing issues.

• The need for educators to have to rely on Amazon Wish Lists or other crowdsourcing to get basic supplies. Teachers should never have to dip into their own savings to provide basic classroom necessities!

• AR-15s.

• Arrival and dismissal duties!

• The expectation that because we love our job and children, we are considered villains when we advocate for higher pay, better working conditions, and to basically be treated as the highly educated, competent professionals that we are.

• A rigid pacing guide.

• Guilt that I can never do enough or be enough for everyone.

• Formal teacher evaluations: regular visits and informal observations would be more helpful and authentic.

• Worrying about kids eating lunch and breakfast.l