I’m sitting here in my high-school German classroom at the end of another week. It’s about 6:15 PM. I’ve been here in the school since before 8:00 this morning. That makes it…let’s see now…a 10.25-hour workday. That’s how most of my days have been the last two months.
I’m a German teacher outside of Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia–a county that still offers German at all its high schools and just about all its middle schools. This is a good place to be. The famously wealthy Fairfax County, where I live and where my children graduated high school, is letting German die off slowly and quietly in its schools. That’s really shameful, if you think about it. Fairfax considers itself in many respects to be the “home of the Internet.” Network Solutions, which was the sole registrar for all .com, .net, and .org domains through the 1990s, has its headquarters in Herndon, on the northwestern edge of Fairfax County.
German is the second-most frequently used language on the Internet, after English. Fortunately, Loudoun County, home to AOL and Dulles International Airport, is not as parochial as Fairfax, and still offers German widely. This means I am sure to have a job here for a long time.
The downside of this, however, is that I have five, count ‘em, five course preparations this year. Because I am the sole German teacher at a new school, I teach every level of German that is offered by the county: levels one through five (fifth-year being an Advanced Placement course). I know very few other teachers who have this pleasure. Whenever a school has more than one teacher, invariably somebody is doing two or more sections of the same course–two sections of second-year Spanish, for example. That means any given teacher’s five-class teaching load is divided up between, or among, only two or three different courses. But I get one class of each and every level. That’s the situation for most German and Latin teachers around here.
If you’ve taught school before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have to do five completely different shows every two days. Teaching is like the most demanding performance anyone ever gave. A teacher on the block schedule has to hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes. That’s the standard length of a Las Vegas show. The difference between me and a Las Vegas show, however, is that there’s only one of me, while even a “one-man” show in Vegas has a whole crew of people behind it.
Oh–one other difference between me and a Las Vegas show: I get paid a teacher’s salary. And I get three personal leave (i.e., vacation) days during each school year. True, I get the summers “off”–but that means I have free time to take courses, lead student tours to Europe, and write and plan the county curriculum.
I am exhausted right now. That’s why this post is so long. I don’t have the energy to stop typing.
Think I’m going to go home and drink wine and watch the baseball playoffs now. The whole thing starts up again Monday morning, bright and early.
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I teach at the university level and I spend between 8 and 12 hours a week preparing notes for my classes. At the end I have about 8 pages of stuff to present to them in just 1 hour each week (I teach a reduced seat time course, so we only meet 1 hour for a 3 hour course and they do the rest of their learning from the book and online). I can’t imagine teaching 5 different classes. Now I understand why so many teachers rely on text books rather than create notes like I do: there’s simply not time to do that for so many classes.
Gordon, before I taught in Loudoun County I was a university insructor/professor for 13 years. I came to DC to take a tenure-line job at American University.
I well recall all the hours I spent preparing notes, lectures, exercises and other activities for each class. All the while I was expected to keep doing research and publish (which I did, although it ended up not even getting me tenure).
When I started teaching high school, I discovered a whole new scheme. It was suddenly more about seeing these people every day (or every other day, on the block schedule, but it’s the same idea) and keeping something going regularly.
If it weren’t for the pacing of a county-prescribed curriculum and the basal textbook, I would spend until about midnight every day staring at a blank notebook, wondering what new, fresh thing I would bring to the classroom the next day.
I now know that the freshness I bring is simply myself. Wherever I am that day, that’s where the lesson plan is. It’s planned, to be sure, but not always predictable.
It’s Saturday and I’m still tired, see: I just can’t stop typing once I start!