Teachers’ needs -
I just finished reading about a San Diego teacher who sells a line of advertisement at the bottom of his test papers. The advertisement fee is just enough to pay for the paper and the printing of the test (including quizzes and finals). http://news.aol.com/article/teacher-sells-advertising-on-tests/277109 He hasn’t had a problem finding buyers. Some of the district’s residents have a problem with that solution so the teacher challenges them to open up their wallets.
Teachers have usually had to pay for many supplies out of their pockets. A few years ago the federal government allowed a $250 tax break for teachers’ classroom supplies when filing income taxes. This doesn’t mean we get the full $250 back. It just gets taken out of the taxable income. Sometimes it just makes a few dollars difference.
Some teachers experience a shortage of supplies more than others. A lot depends on the district residents’ economic situation (the property taxes pay for a big chunk of the school budget). New teachers usually spend more than older teachers the first few years to start up their classes.
When I started teaching high school in Arlington, Texas I knew I had it good because I had just come from teaching in a Dallas middle school. In Arlington, most teachers would make their day’s handouts in the morning on one of the three copy machines while using the never-ending supply of paper. We also had a supply room to get tape, construction paper…etc. We were also given $20 to order whatever we needed from the Office Depot catalog. I guess we got the supplies wholesale because the prices were so cheap that it made me mad at how they apparently marked up the prices at least 400% at their stores. By then I had already built up my own supply of classroom necessities, paid for by me, myself and I.
I, unfortunately, have negative memories of my time at the Dallas schools. The quality of the kids was lacking in behavior and academics, to put it very mildly. They reflected the families of the community. Some teachers were very decent but others who had lower standards were hired because the inner city schools have a hard time keeping good teachers because they (we) move on to better suburban schools. Since I was a new teacher I was constantly trying to keep up with reading the new textbooks, workbooks, audio, and video material and making my lesson plans, handouts, quizzes, tests, and all the red tape of write-ups for misbehaviors, logging phone calls home and grading. I also hadn’t found my personality’s style of discipline so I was very stressed by the kids’ misbehavior and my inability to control them. It’s a stressful enough job after five years but the first few years are often unbearable. National statistics show that half of new teachers quit within the first five years.
I often paid $30 dollars a pop to Kinko’s on my way to school to make my test papers because I had just finished typing them the night before and the school didn’t have a copy machine. We only had an old Riso which was tucked behind the secretary’s desk and she would make the copies for us but she needed the original 24 hours in advance. Later in the year we did get a copy machine with each teacher getting a certain amount of paper that we would keep in our classrooms and a code to input to be sure that we didn’t go over our limited number of copies. Unfortunately, many teachers’ codes were stolen by other teachers.
We also didn’t have enough books to assign to the students so the teacher would have a class set and hand them out at the beginning of each class period. Of course this limited the type of homework that I could assign and the students couldn’t learn as fast or as well. Also, the students would destroy the books since they weren’t assigned to them so I assigned a book number to each student and had to take valuable time out of the class period to check the book’s condition at the end of the period. And don’t get me started about when a sub would come…Since she didn’t keep track of the book assignments the students would slaughter the books. I’d also find books on the roof of the temporary and in the mud. Because of the overcrowding in the building the district would bring in trailer classrooms called temporaries. (It was supposed to be used only temporarily). After lunch when I’d come back to my classroom I’d flip out my key to open the locked door only to find a lot of broken sticks and other debris in the keyhole. There was nothing else for the principal to do but to call the locksmith. By the time the locksmith came and did his job class would be over. I also got hit more than once on the back of the head in the classroom by students who would throw rocks when I had my back turned to them while writing on the board. I learned to write on the board by standing sideways. The following year, after I had moved on to Arlington, I read in the papers that the Dallas ISD superintendent had been arrested for embezzling millions of dollars.
Moving to Arlington was the right move for me. The quality of the students and workable environment did wonders for my desire to improve myself and make learning fun. I spent hours designing fun, constructive and effective lesson plans, whereas in Dallas I would do the minimum requirements. I went on to become a very good teacher. I was loved by most of my students and was considered the most effective in my department of seven teachers. My classes always scored higher on the same tests than the rest of the department’s students. Mothers would ask me to please ask the counselors to assign their kids to my class since they heard from other kids’ parents that I was a very good teacher. Of course I would never agree to it.
I wasn’t happy in Dallas, and, if the teacher ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, but I highly respect those good teachers who happily and lovingly stay behind in the trenches. They are a special breed of people who can see beyond a tweener’s foul mouth and selfish misbehavior to bring out the best in them. The reason they write books and make movies about these types of teachers is because they are few and far between.
Well, on a positive note, the aforementioned advertising teacher had permission from his principal. The principal and teachers also agreed to register their school supplies wish list on a website, much as brides-to-be do. Their students’ parents, in turn, look at the teacher’s school supply needs and can purchase an item for them.
