February 15, 2012

What do teachers do?

By hchev

I came across this picture on Facebook (please excuse the inappropriateness of the first photo). Its the last photo that really hits home for me, I know its supposed to be depicting a teacher up to his elbows in marking, but that’s not how I interpreted it. I interpreted this last photo as a teacher being swamped with the endless paper work that is required of him (or her). What is teaching really? And who is teaching for?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 9:38 pm and posted in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

7 Responses to “What do teachers do?”

messagesfrommyjourney
February 15th, 2012 at 10:15 pm

I believe that teaching is relationships…. It is about relationships between student and teacher, student and student, teacher and content, student and content, teacher and admin, the list goes on. If the the last picture titled “What I actually do” is true for some teachers, I would argue that their priorities are out of place, and out dated. Todays teachers engage in their work just as we ask our students to engage in learning.

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- emily knowles
  April 6th, 2012 at 1:06 am
  
  I agree completely about teaching being about relationships- relationships and connections. In this way teaching is about learning from each other, allowing opportunities for students to discover and for students to be engaged in the world and what makes them happy. Teaching is, like stated above, much more then paper work and marking, teaching is about being and creating, and allowing students the opportunity to do so as well.
  
  Reply
annaraskolnikoff
February 16th, 2012 at 4:44 am

I think the last two are very accurate… And I hope you will be doing a lot of “what I think I do”

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Alec Couros (@courosa)
February 16th, 2012 at 4:55 am

I think the first comment is important – it’s hard to be caught up with all of this paperwork when relationships are the most important thing. Often, assessment (at least traditional assessment) doesn’t best represent those relationships. Assessment is indeed important, but often it is done in ways that is disrespectful to those relationships and adverse to the learning that *should* be taking place.

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missburghardt
February 17th, 2012 at 8:38 pm

For myself, I would switch the last two pictures. It feels like all I do is the planning and the papers, but in actuality, when I think about it, I know I am creating a great learning environment, developing relationships with my students, and leading my students to new knowledge.

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- hchev
  February 19th, 2012 at 1:30 am
  
  I like your outlook on it : )
  
  Reply
A message about ECMP 355.. | Messages From My Journey
April 5th, 2012 at 7:50 pm

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