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Careers / Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education |
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Reviews |
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There are 4 reviews of this career. |
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Write an online review and share your thoughts about this career with others! |
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Write an online review and share your thoughts about this career with others! |
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Write an online review and share your thoughts about this career with others! |
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Author: |
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Anonymous |
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Date: |
January 06, 2007 |
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I would recommend teaching Kindergarten to anyone who loves children of a very young age. You definitely need to have taken child psychology and classroom management. The student teachers I have had in my classroom are the weakest in the area of classroom management. People considering teaching kindergarten need to know that it is more exhausting and a much harder grade than any other grade to teach. You need a lot of energy, enthusiasm, and desire to be with very small children. You are teaching them all of the basics. They do not even know how to line up to walk down the hallway, many do not know how to wash their hands after using the bathroom, they can't tie their shoes, zip their coats or blow their noses. However, above and beyond that, you are expected to teach them the letters and sounds, numbers, science and social. It is not an easy job, but it is definitely worth it. I will continue to teach kindergarten for the rest of my career. |
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Write an online review and share your thoughts about this career with others! |
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Author: |
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Anonymous |
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Date: |
December 08, 2006 |
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I would never recommend teaching as a career for any young person starting out unless something in our present educational system changed drastically. I know that if I had it to do over, I would never choose teaching.
Teaching is a no-win situation, especially if you work in small, poor school districts. The government has cut back educational spending to where it is very inadequate to meet the needs of schools. The state governments can't afford to adequately fund the schools, either, and a larger percentage of money goes to larger school districts, but it still isn't enough.
I taught for the last 4 years in a very small, rural district in south Tennessee, and it was a bad experience. When I started I was given a dirty, rundown room with a few tables and some broken-down toys and told to start teaching. If I had been a teacher prior to going there, I would have had materials to use. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, so I started from point 0.
They did have a partial set of the language arts materials the district had adopted for me to use. Of course, a lot of things that the lessons asked for weren't available. I wasn't aware until later that the more senior teacher had kept a lot of the things I needed even though we were team teaching, and I was doing all the language arts. I was forced to make my own materials to use with the program.
I also had to teach Bridges, a self-improvement learning system for children. I did my own art and music. I started pulling materials from the Internet and buying used books and toys in lots from ebay. I spent a lot of money buying things to use in class. I got really good at finding bargains at flea markets, too. It's very hard to keep 18 children occupied without anything they can do on their own.
During that first year I was required to have evaluations. I had to prepare a sheet about the lesson I was going to teach and then sign up for a time on the principal's signup sheet. Unfortunately, she never looked at the sheet, and she never showed up the first time for an evaluation. That meant I had to do several page-long write-ups instead of just doing one. I had missed the new teacher meetings at the beginning of the year because of my late hire, and about mid year I learned that I was supposed to have written a unit plan and a lesson plan from it to keep on file.
As I kept working, things got harder and harder as the budget kept going downhill and more work kept being piled on teachers. I had to do all of my own janitorial work. I had to keep children occupied in the early mornings while I took attendance, figured lunches, and dealt with any parents who happened to come in. We no longer had "special" classes of art and music, so the teachers were expected to teach those as well as all the other classes. High school teachers had an hour of planning each day plus a full half hour lunch. Primary teachers got less than a half hour of planning a day and spent half their lunches helping the children get their trays. By this time I was teaching math, science and social studies in addition to language arts. By my second year I was up to 7 special needs students who wouldn't work without 1-on-1 help and no assistant to work with them.
I got very frustrated. I felt that I was slighting my higher students because I had to spend so much of my time with these special needs kids. I loved the special needs kids, don't get me wrong, but there just wasn't enough of me to go around.
I won't go into any more details, because I know it only sounds like complaining, but I'm not alone in my feelings. Most teachers I know, including long-timers, say they would never recommend for anyone to go into the teaching field. It is an exceedingly hard job if you do it right, it means working nights, weekends, and summers just to keep up, and it pays very low compared to other professions. |
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Displaying reviews 1 - 4 of 4 |
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