Do you remember the show Dragnet? A great line from the show was "Just the facts ma'am." Yes! The facts. I love the facts. Schools today have this need to present the facts, and more often than not, we are wrong. Yes, it's true; we are wrong for presenting the facts. Apparently our society has this vision that all schools make up stories. As teachers, we perform poorly, we don't want to work, and we don't want to change In fact, we don't even care about the kids.
Yes, we have decided that the huge salaries that we make, the free time, the perfect children, and the endless amount of vacations that we receive are just because we do no care about children. Those are the facts that have become the belief of many in our society. It's amazing!
As an educator, we teach students to question, research, and get information in order to make educated decisions. This holds true for every subject we teach. My question to society is, "Why have we forgotten this when we grow older"?
When people say educators (administrators and teachers) don't work more than is required, this assumption is false. Hasn't anyone seem them at events at night? Hasn't anyone asked when do they grade papers if they are teaching all day? Somebody must be working.
When we speak about the exorbitant salaries, has anyone checked the average salary for a teacher with a Master's Degree? It is much lower than one would expect of someone in business, yet we still are accused of making a tremendous living.
And finally, there is the issue of vacation. As I write this, I am thinking about this past week as I was working at school. As an administrator, I work during the summer; many of us do. Last week I saw at least 25% of teachers (a different 25% was at the school the previous week) looking at the classrooms and figuring out which books they can take home to begin working on their lessons. So yes, we do nothing in the summer.
Just the facts!