I can't really wish to work from home. I had a blast during the Pandemic teaching and so did my class, but, that wasn't best practices. I can't really wish for shorter hours. From how we're judged as teachers there's a finite amount of time to teach information and give a product my “customers” mostly do not want. I get marked down for being ineffective because of my 28 students, 9 were (quietly and non-disruptively) disengaged during a lesson at one point.
One of my kids threatens to self harm if you try to make them do work and I have to talk to admin about why his scores are so low and come up with a plan to fix it. This wasn't covered in my job description, yo. There's no book section about if a kid tries to stab themselves to get out of math class and how this effects your ratings.
Teachers here get paid about 40k a year. Having an oversized classroom causes the school to be fined 10k. Most teachers this year had classes of 28-31 children in their 5th grade. I had a lot of issues with classroom management this year… Partially because I stated out with 21 students and JUST developed a routine and then got 7 more who were 'too challenging' to be put in other classrooms.
Do you know how defeating that is to be talked to about how your class is hard to manage and out of control when you DID HAVE CONTROL. To be told: “everyone has challenging kids” and not have “Yes, but my challenging kids got into fights with each other before they were even in the same classroom and had to be walked separately and now I have them together and there's no support”
I like teaching. I LOVE teaching. I spent about 2k this year for the privilege of being a teacher; we had to buy our own paper to make copies. Our own pencils, dry erase markers… When I was out sick my students DESTROYED EVERYTHING. Admin was in my room but somehow that didn't stop them. Two electric pencil sharpeners, two big crayola classroom sets. Four chairs, my library.
They asked why I didn't have supplies for the kids. I lost points on what I had available in my library WHICH AGAIN I HAD TO PURCHASE FOR MY STUDENTS BOOK BY BOOK.
The school gave me 250 for the whole year for supplies. Chart paper is 60 dollars a pop.