Someone Who Deserves More Credit

The prompt: Name someone who deserves more credit.

My quick answer is my principal and her support staff.

Why? Because teaching is a difficult job. Most of the joy comes between the bells. A lot of what we need to accomplish outside the bells consists of thankless, boring, tedious, and monotonous tasks — grading, meetings, tutoring (IF you're willing to do it; I'm not), prepping, cleaning, and other odds and ends. That's not very fun, and these are the difficult elements (usually. There always is one or two kids that are… sigh, hard.).

Now imagine all the tasks I find thankless, boring, tedious and monotonous and there you have the jobs of principals, resource teachers, and the school support staff times A LOT. They need to deal with students, teachers, parents, district office personnel, outside providers, and any other hiccup that comes to mind. Whereas we have the joy of working with students, being in our rooms generally out of harm's way (although there are SOME parents…), principals and their staff are on the front line. They get crazy delivered in spades whether they want it or not. Seriously, I've watched a principal have to sit in a room with a child going completely non-linear and keeping the child, the staff, other children, etc. safe from this unhappy little bundle of crazy.

Now I sympathize with anyone who says their principal isn't that good. Been there, done that. That's why I said MY principal and HER staff.

I feel these people are sincere and want the school to move forward. I see the frustration and understand the evil looks when teachers (like me) are difficult (getting in the way). There's a lot to moving a school forward and it involves a lot of work, building trust and rapport with pretty much everyone. That's not an easy task. Add to that dealing with money, daily district office mandates, multiple meetings, plus weekly attendance at school events, and you've got a GINORMOUS job.

Here's why I know these people deserve more credit. Even if I were to get much better pay (although, I think with the whole insurance thing, that's not really true), I still wouldn't want that job. It looks too hard to me. And, baby, I'm not afraid of hard work!