Time Sucking Career

Perry has been teaching for over two decades. All the years we've been married, I've never known him to walk through the door at the end of his school day and continue working...until this year. Somehow he seemed willing or able to compartmentalize. When he's home, he's home. This is his second year teaching AP Environmental Studies at Poway, and somehow things are different. Either it's his own high standards, or some kind of internal or external pressure to compete with other AP teachers (PHS AP classes have a high pass percentage, apparently), Perry now not only will sit at the kitchen table grading papers ("these math problems go faster than reading essays," he says, as if to cheer himself), but now he spends weekends (yes, that's plural: Saturdays and Sundays) hunkered down in his crowded, untidy, disorganized office, planning and grading and making PowerPoint presentations, just to keep up.

Does anyone even know how ridiculous this all sounds? These additional hours don't even begin to make a dent in what a teacher is expected to accomplish, on top of being prepared to manage five periods of 35+ adolescents, five days a week, with a thirty minute "lunch" (during which time he'll run to the workroom to make copies while munching a hard-boiled egg) and barely a minute to run to the toilet during the day. It would be remarkable if most teachers in the public school weren't constipated. There's no time to sit...

Why do teachers put up with this? It's inhumane. When will someone sit down and figure out that this time-sucking, life-sucking, joy-sucking, sanity-sucking job needs a radical make-over? Someone with a head on her shoulders (yes, it would have to be a "she" because women tend to be more attuned to the the mundane aspects that contribute to a saner life...like going to the toilet when you need to go) needs to really sit down and analyze how to create a more humane approach to teaching. For instance, here's a thought: Built into every teacher's contract should be a mandatory "Seven Year Sabbatical" (I'm modeling this after something I recall reading in the Old Testament, something called a Jubilee, where every seven years in Israel is a year of rest). Anyway, it would go like this: all teachers are required to take a year off, with pay, to rejuvenate. They can travel, they can study, they can take college courses, whatever. But the year would be fully compensated at their normal rate.

Teaching is both an academic and a creative profession. Creativity can get exhausted and depleted. If we expect our teachers to perform at optimum level, forget the threats, forget the pressure (Race to the Top). Let them rejuvenate and revitalize. Reward them monetarily. Restore humanity to what has become an insanely inhumane profession.