Teachers

After reading some responses on my favorite weather blog concerning teachers, I must say I am disheartened.  I went back to school at age forty, after divorcing the man I was married to for 21 long years.  I went back to get my teaching degree because it was what I wanted to be all my life.  I like children, want to help them learn and to enjoy it, I love reading, and that is what I teach: middle school reading.  I didn't go into teaching because of the summers or the huge amount of pay; anyone who knows anything about teaching will know that teachers do not get paid that much, and there is no such thing as free time off with pay.

Apparently some people have the idea we teachers are paid huge money, have tons of free time, and still want days off with pay.  I hate to burst their bubbles of whatever it is they are drinking, but teachers are paid a salary that is spread out so that it seems like we get paid during the summer, but we do not.  When we miss days, we have to make them up and sometimes go to school until the middle of June.  Again, this is not a paid holiday but part of my salary.  Apparently they think teachers have too much time on their hands and want more and more days off because we do not care about the students learning.  I get up at five a.m. in the morning, do laundry and get ready for work, then leave the house at 6:40 because it takes me an hour to drive to work...and yes, and hour to drive home.  The price of gas takes a huge chunk of my pay just to get to work and back home.   My day does not end at 3 o'clock.  I have bus duties, so many meetings I can barely keep track of them, school events, and professional development that all occur after regular school hours.  Do I get paid overtime for all this time?  I do not.
I care about my students and the learning that takes place in my classroom.  It is not easy, because many of my students are apathetic about learning.  There is no one at home to encourage them to want to learn, no one to teach them respect or how to act in public, and some of them have such horrible lives that I don't even know how they make it to school each day.  It is not easy to deal with behavior problems, but I do the best I can and go on.  My job is to help them learn and to try to enjoy that learning so that they can become adults with the ability to take care of themselves.
This "Waiting for Superman" movie portrays teachers in a horrible way.  Sure, there are teachers out there who should not be in the field or should be retired, but  ALL teachers are not like that, just like all doctors are not quacks. I do not know of any teachers who play on the computer all day or sleep and quite frankly, if this is happening there is something wrong with the principal for not being a part of the school life.
I just want people to realize what teachers really deal with before they go saying things that they have no proof of.  I am a teacher because I chose to be, I love my job, and I want to teach children, not because I wanted summers off and to get rich quickly.
  

What's it all about?

I have a favorite weather blog website where I go to learn about what weather to expect and read the comments from all the people who are weather junkies like me.  Sometimes the people on the blog get too rude, make comments they shouldn't, especially about things of which they know nothing about.  
I consider myself to be fairly intelligent and in possession of social "know-how", so when some of the comments inflame my senses, I know the weather blog is not the place to air my feelings.  Taking the idea from my savvy niece, Emily, I decided to create a blog where I could enter my thoughts about miscellaneous things in my life.
So, here I am today, bewildered about what to do and how to make this blog interesting, and especially how to make it work.  A long-time fan of learning, I suppose I'll take it one step at a time and work out all the kinks until I am happy with what I see.