More and More Demands

Every day we seem to have a new directive: Make sure you do this! Make sure you do that! It inevitably involves paperwork -- a kind of accounting of what we teachers are doing minute - by - minute. You want to see how I teach? Sit in on a class. Ask my students. Take a look through my students' work.

For whom are we keeping these records? It's one thing to assess a student when you initially get them to get a sense of where they are. We use that data to inform our instructional design. It's one thing to assess student work: of COURSE we do that. What teacher doesn't do that? How can you teach without assessing your students' work? We do that all the time: quizzes, tests, papers, in-class discussions, individual conferences with students. It's another thing to invent assessment upon assessment to please administration. My assessments are created to assess my effectiveness as a teacher, the validity of my curriculum and the students' knowledge, but I could spend endless additional hours making more paperwork to put in a notebook that, if we're lucky, will get looked at once a year. Let me do my job. If you want all this extra paperwork, pay me for each additional hour I have to work above and beyond developing an effective curriculum and learning environment for my students.