Elementary School Teacher Pros & Cons

Video Transcript

"We're going to finish up where we left off yesterday with Slugs and Snails, by Claire Llewellyn and Barry Watts. Today we're going to read about where they live. If you love kids, you get to spend every day with them. And, I love being able to be nine years old for every year for the rest of my life. That's the best part to me. It's an amazing vacation schedule. As a first year employee anywhere, who gets ten weeks off for summer, a week off for Thanksgiving, two weeks off for Christmas, and a week off for spring break. You just can't beat that. The community supports you. I've never had to rally for my own pay raise, and I've never met anybody who thinks teachers get paid enough. So it's really great to have everybody kind of rallied around your job and supporting you in that way. I think another great thing is you control the climate of your job. So if you complain about it, you're in charge of it. I think everybody's had the experience of being in a classroom. Christmas is great--you know, sixteen extra people brining you gifts, that's always nice. I don't know. You learn--you continue to learn for the rest of your life. Work comes home with you. Report card time, work comes home with you a lot. And the job's never finished. You can't finish this job. There's always more for them to know. You just do as much as you can in the time that you have with them. My personal financial investment into the classroom is dramatically more than I would have ever anticipated. I don't--that's something I don't think people realize is how much personal money teachers spend on a classroom, on the students, on props, on--if I want the students to taste a certain thing, going and buying that. Or if I want the students to see a certain thing, going and buying that. And we do get reimbursed up to a certain amount, but it doesn't come close to what the average teacher spends in a classroom. One of the challenges of the job is that the nationally standardized required tests--they also require us to teach to differentiated students in the different ways that they learn. So they're requiring one pen and paper test for students who learn in a variety of ways, and they recognize in the curriculum, learn in a variety of ways. But they're only going to test them and assess them based on one method. So that's been particularly challenging. Is that from no child left behind?"