Teacher Appreciation Week

 

As we celebrate teacher appreciation this week, I’ve been reflecting on what appreciation has looked like during my career so far. The biggest trend is that appreciation is shown as support. I realize support looks different for different teachers and in different years.  In the support, expectation and consistency play a big role.  

While teacher appreciation is 1 week, the support is needed all year long.  Support for my classes looks like ensuring my co-teacher can be in the room for class each day.  Support is protecting our planning time several days a week.  Support is setting realistic expectations for teachers. For example, we often need more than 24 hours to respond to all the emails we receive in a day.  

One of the biggest things I've seen change for the better is work time.  In the beginning, we worked long hours and several weekends at the school.  If you weren't able to work the weekends they wanted to know why.   We were paid for coming in and tutoring/teaching on the weekends.  In more recent years, there has been a push for only working contract hours and nothing more.  I started doing this and it's freeing.  It also requires support and understanding.  I'd encourage you if you aren't working only contract hours to start.  The first step for me was not answering emails outside of contract hours, in the beginning, I set an out of office reply so parents and students knew that I would get back to them when I returned to work in the morning or on Monday's after a weekend.  The next step was making my daily to do list and doing as much as I could from it and being okay with what didn't get done that day and had to wait until the next.  

I hope you have a great teacher appreciation week.