Have you ever said to yourself, I can’t believe this is part of my job description? Keep in mind, the thing that you’re doing is probably not really listed in your contract, but it is something that’s part of your job that you may be required to do. Things like:
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Is anyone else currently going through the accreditation process? Our school has been WASC Accredited, but they always give us areas of improvements that we need to fix before they return in a couple years.
One of the areas they want us to improve is our curriculum guides (also known as course maps). At our last visitation four years ago, they told us we needed to create course maps in every grade level. So all of us teachers scrambled together, took an entire school year, and developed our course maps. When they revisited us two years ago, they told us we need to add more content to our existing course maps like state or national standards and the ESLER’s.
Is anyone else going through this same process?
My last blog talked about the perks of teaching in a private school. Today I want to talk about some of the downsides. There aren’t many, and this is just one of many reasons why I am keeping myself as anonymous as I can. That way I can be completely honest about what I do, without feeling like I’m going to upset someone I work with, or God forbid, a parent!!! So here it goes:
Let’s go ahead and start with difficulties with parents. At our school the parents pay tuition for their kids’ education, which sometimes results in parents thinking that since they pay, they should be able to tell me how to run my class. No, no, no!! That is not how it works, wonderful parents. If I ever allowed that to happen, then I would have 28 or so parents telling me different ways to run my class, and there’s no way I can appease all of them. So how about my boss tells me how to run the class (which, coincidentally is the same way I like to run my class), and then everyone will be happy.
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On my last blog I talked about the differences between public school and private school. Today I want to discuss what I enjoy most about working at a private school.
One of the aspects about our school that I love so much is that we have been able to keep our enrichment courses. We refer to library, computers, P.E., art, and music as “enrichment courses.” These courses are “pull-out” classes where the students leave my classroom and are taught these subjects by a different teacher. They visit these classes once a week for 30 - 45 minutes, depending on the class. I know a lot of other schools in our area who have not been able to hold on to these programs (both private and public). We have been blessed during this rough economy to still be able to provide these resources (and more) in our program.
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I work at a private school. There are a few incorrect stigmas about private school that I’ve heard from other public school teachers. We can be viewed inferior to public schools since we are able to “teach what we want” and not every teacher is required to have a credential. Sometimes we are viewed as snobby and over-pretentious.
I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about our school but I will say this about it: I love working at a private school. It’s true, we do not have the same demands as public schools, but that doesn’t mean that we have full reign to do whatever we’d like in our classroom. We do have the freedom to skip a chapter in a text book if we know that the students will be covering that content the following year. We have the freedom to slow down in math if we have a good number of students who need more time to master a concept. Our administrators support us if we don’t like our curriculum and want to switch to a new publisher, provided we have the funds to do so.