Time is the fire in which we burn

I find myself, on an almost daily basis, choosing to take the time I have available to prepare what is required in order to satisfy administrative edicts, rather than prepare a better, more interesting, more involving lesson for my students.

This pisses me off.

First, let me be clear -- it isn't that I'm attempting to determine how to spend the 7.33 hours a day for which I am paid; that time and more is spent (a) teaching - 4.5 hours, (b) in mandatory meetings - 0.6 hours, (c) standing at my door between classes and walking my students to and from the lunchroom (both mandatory) - 0.25 hours, (d) maintaining the classroom (e.g., posting the mandatory agenda board, erasing the white boards in preparation for the next class, straightening desks) - 0.5 hours, (e) recording attendance and grades - 0.25 hours, (f) typing the three mandatory lesson plans per day (note: this isn't "preparing the lesson"... it's "typing the lesson plan") - 0.5 hours, (g) grading papers - 0.75 hours (note: I spend considerably more than 45 minutes grading papers; this is just my "planning period" time).

The time I'm talking about having to allocate to administrative edicts is (all or part of) the extra 3 to 4 hours a day I spend on school work during the week, or the 6 to 10 hours I spend each Saturday and Sunday on the weekends I'm not traveling to see my children.  I'm paid a little over $20 an hour for the time delineated in the previous paragraph; I'm unpaid for the time described in this one.

Don't get me wrong -- this isn't a request for pity.  I chose to take this job, knowing what it paid, and I choose to work the extra hours, knowing they're unpaid.  But I'm sitting here on a Sunday morning with 8 items on my agenda, in order of my estimate of their value to the education of the students in my class:

(1) designing an interesting, challenging, interactive game for my students to play in small groups that involves going to different stations in the room and solving problems like the ones they did so poorly on when taking their recent test. (I have the general concept, but I need to flesh it out.)

(2) using the "Jeopardy" PowerPoint shell to create an in-class review activity for the current module.

(3) planning the next two weeks of classes for each section, so that the students have an idea of what they'll be doing between now and the end of the quarter, and they'll be able to plan how they will bring their grades up prior to the first report card.

(4) writing and printing "scholarship warnings" for all of my students who currently have a D or F in my class.  This is somewhere between 50 and 70 students, because the most of them were taken by surprise by their first high school math test.  I guess middle school tests were absurdly easy.

(5) grading 5 classes' tests and putting them in the grade system.

(6) printing progress reports for all students so they know what grade they have and what they need to do to improve it.  Note:  they could go online for this information, but we're required to print the reports anyway.

(7) creating a "standards-based bulletin board" that shows students (who never look at it) how the project displayed on the board is graded, and what a good project would look like.

(8) creating "student-generated" charts.  There doesn't seem to be any other requirement for these charts, other than being student-generated.  I may have three students in first block tomorrow write "This is a chart generated by a student" on chart paper and hang those up.  But probably not.

Of course, it's extremely unlikely I'll get to all 8 things.  If I just got to the first 3, I'd feel pretty good.  Unfortunately, those 3 items are the three that my administration places no value on.  The other 5 are all items that will be checked on by my administration, and for which I will receive a poor evaluation should they be missing or incomplete.

I'm already tired, and it's only 10 AM.