Our teachers need time, say two who didn’t have it

The Tucson man worked for more than 30 years as an engineer before deciding it was time for a change. So this year, he became a teacher. He lasted nine weeks. “Before (this), I never had a job that made me break down in tears,” he told me.

The Glendale man was a respiratory therapist, and before that, he worked in a therapeutic group home with kids who had “behavior defiance issues.” He decided he’d like to be a teacher to share his love of science. He lasted four weeks.

“I tried so hard, but in the end, I just couldn’t cut it,” he told me.

The two men aren’t alone.

It’s not yet October, and already, 526 teachers have left the classroom, according to the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association.

Of those, 90 abandoned the job, leaving their keys in the classroom and notifying administrators they wouldn’t be back.

This, as Arizona struggles to find qualified teachers — or even not-so-qualified ones.

According to the school personnel group’s survey of 135 districts and charter schools, the state is still short 1,328 teachers this year. Another 2,491 classrooms are filled by people who weren’t trained as teachers but came into the classroom through “alternative” methods.

The two men were among them. Both asked that their names and schools not be used. The problems, they say, aren’t limited to those schools.

Both said it wasn’t the lack of pay that ran them off. It was the lack of time to do the job right.

The Tucson man taught corporate classes while working as an engineer. He thought he’d enjoy teaching highschool math.

The problem wasn’t teaching algebra II and college algebra. It was all the other stuff he had to do. Like coping with nearly a third of the class coming in late because there was no consequence for tardiness (until he developed his own).

Like having to go to Office Depot at night to make copies of the next day’s assignments because he didn’t have access to a school printer.

Like filling out reports and documenting bad behavior and tracking down parents during his lunch hour.

Like dealing with constant interruptions — from students’ cellphones to couriers who apparently don’t think their deliveries can wait until the end of class.

Like having to log two hours every week in professional-development classes. This, even though he was taking required education classes at night at Pima Community College.

All this, and having to spend long

hours planning lessons and developing his own material because the district didn’t supply much — and what was supplied was “thin and weak to the point of not being usable.”

“I needed more time to do planning, to understand my material and tune it so it was a highly effective weapon as opposed to two hours of professional development or driving down to Office Depot because I don’t have access to a copier,” he said.

Seventy-hour weeks, with no end in sight, quickly became a strain. That, and the fact that he knew that students were being shortchanged.

“It’s the gap between what you know you can do if you’re given the time and what you’re actually able to do,” he said. “It’s the stress of knowing that you can do the job but you just don’t have the time to do it. And you want to do the job. I really wanted to deliver for these kids.” His last day was Friday.

The Glendale man says he was offered a position at every school in the district and took a job teaching middleschool science. “I wanted to share my passion for science,” he said, though he knew, going in, that he’d have to teach one social-studies class.

Imagine his surprise to later learn that he’d also be teaching math to 28 students operating at about a fifth-grade level.

And that he’d have to teach it with no direction about what to teach or how to teach it.

“I am not a math teacher. Hell, I was barely a science teacher,” he said. “The real eighth-grade math teacher was doing an accelerated math class. … This made little sense to me. Why is the worst teacher teaching the worst math students? How is that fixing the achievement gap?”

Other teachers shared social-studies material, he said, but it was mainly maps to color and word puzzles and such — not nearly enough for a newbie teacher to stretch into an meaningful lesson.

“Since I had not taught a lot, my classes would finish a lot faster,” he said. “I had not mastered the art of elongating a lesson. This led to confused students, which led to chaos in the classroom.”

As for science, the books are 12 years old and useless, and there weren’t enough for every student to have one anyway. He had to not only create his own lesson plans, but scrounge around for reading material to cover the topic of the day.

It took about three hours a day to plan one 60-minute science lesson, he said, with two more hours to plan for math and social studies.

School never ended. He got up at 4 a.m. to prepare for the day, and evenings were spent grading papers and working on the next day’s lesson plans.

“One morning, I arrived at school and my science lesson fell apart,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. So I lied, telling them my wife was sick, and I went home. I started thinking about crashing my car into a sign or something so I could get a week off to prepare more lessons.”

He said the principal tried to help, but the workload was just too overwhelming.

“I was an awful math teacher — my lessons were bad, and the students knew that. I felt like a fraud teaching them that subject, and the students see straight through that,” he said. “My science classes were all right. Not perfect, but manageable. Math and social studies were trench warfare. Throwing rocks, spitting on the floor, punching, cursing, etc. I was spent, and the students knew it.”

His last day was Aug. 31.

Both men offered suggestions for ways to smooth the path for first-year teachers. Chief among them: Give them the time to do the job right.

Offer more support. Create a database of “useful stuff” to help structure lessons, rather than just an alphabetical list of standards that must be covered.

Pair them with strong partner teachers in the same discipline, so they can lean on their more experienced colleagues for material rather than having to start from scratch developing their own. Allow teachers time to teach.

“I wanted to make a difference,” the Tucson man told me. “But the emotional and physical stress of nine weeks of 70 hours per week broke my spirit.”

Both men offered suggestions for ways

to smooth the path for first-year teachers.

Chief among them: Give them the time

to do the job right.