Truly unreasonable workload- long contract hours and you’re expected to do more work at home. My class sizes are 35-44 kids and i have 4 sections so about 170 kids total. I have 2 hours of grading/prep time per day. It feels more like a prison guard position than a teaching position since the rules are incredibly strict (the color of the students socks, where they place their pencils on their desks, the volume that the students ask questions is all supposed to be monitored, controlled, and standardized by the teacher). The idea is to get the students to act as much like robots as possible so they can put as many kids in the room as possible without hiring any additional teachers. There’s no aids or teaching assistants and all the grading and material creation falls on the teacher. We are expected to call the parents of the kids who are absent every day during first period while also teaching first period so they don’t have to hire as many admin assistants. We’re supposed to tell the kids who are sick to take medicine and come to school anyway. We are told that if the teacher says something the students MUST parrot it back blindly without questioning, even if the teacher is wrong. Red flags left, right, and center. The schools are run like a business with the students grades as the product and only care about how the school looks to their extremely wealthy donors when they tour the schools. The mental/emotional wellbeing of the students and teachers is the last priority. The business model is clearly to hire young, inexperienced, naive young people right out of college, (so they don’t know how normal employers act) and then squeeze them for as much work and profit as possible (burning then out in the process) and then hiring a new batch every year because so many people quit and the turnover rate is incredibly high. At the end of the day it’s the students who are in the worst position.
