Unappreciated Teachers

When you think of a teacher you usually think of an older figure. Someone who is supposed to teach and help you learn, but there is a lot more behind that. There’s grading, planning, and actual teaching. These aspects are often looked passed by other students.

Teachers are often unappreciated for many reasons. According to a website called Weareteachers, it claims a teacher spends around 2,200 hours per year doing things such as planning, grading, giving instruction, and emails per year. Which is about a 42 hour week working year round, is more than the average full-time employee would work.

Jennifer Reissig, an APUSH/US history teacher at Yerba Buena High School, has been teaching for eighteen years. Sixteen of those years being at Yerba Buena, and 14 of those same years teaching advanced placement history.

“There is only one to two other APUSH teachers so we don’t have much time to collaborate,” Ms. Reissig explains, AP classes are much harder because there is a lot more planning and grading that goes into it.”

“Essays take me around eight hours to grade one period worth of essays.” This is a lot considering that essays aren’t the only assignments you are doing in the class.

There are loads of classwork, group projects, and notes that students do during class. For a teacher, having to make a whole lesson plan to stay organized for their classes they teach can be very stressful. Teachers also spend most of their free time grading their students' paperwork so that leaves them little time to themselves.

This all seems stressful, yet Ms.Reissig still continues to teach at YB for her students and co-workers.

According to USA Today, back in 2019 the CPS (Chicago Public Schools) went on strike for eleven days, “For a new contract that guarantees all union members a 16% raise over the life of the five-year contract and invests $35 million in reducing class sizes. The contract also guarantees that every school will have a nurse and social worker by 2023, among other guarantees.” Over 32,000+ educators around Chicago went on strike.

According to another article by New York Times. The Los Angeles Strike left over half a million people affected and was one of the largest. The deal includes caps on class sizes, and hiring full-time nurses for every school, as well as a librarian for every middle and high school in the district by the fall of 2020.

They were also on strike for an increase in teachers' pay by 6%. The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers in the nation’s second-largest public school system marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days.

Personally, these are important. These strikes are necessary because school is mean’t to prepare you for the future. Teachers are often kid’s first role models so teachers have a huge impact on young students.

Chris Lopez, a junior at Yerba Buena High School says he is always seeing teachers being overwhelmed with grading/classwork. “My work is always graded quickly ,and sometimes it’s graded incorrectly,” says Chris. He claims that he goes through about 3-4 hours of homework a day, which seems like a very hefty amount of work to be given.

Hypothetically speaking, if a teacher were to give 3-4 hours of work everyday it would add a ton of stress to their lives. Teachers are very underrated and unappreciated when they are some of the greatest heroes and are often left out of peoples' thoughts.

They are regular people by the way, maybe give your teacher a pat on the back and tell them that they’re doing great, it might just bring up their lives.