Technical Educators Are Educators Too

I'm a first year teacher at a middle-of-the-road high school. In addition to their core content classes, students participate in a technical class that prepares them for a certain field. Some of these fields pay double what others do, but the respect the teachers of a field are given seems to be based on perceived technical difficulty. My field is Culinary Arts.

A lot of my students came into the program thinking that we'd spend most of our classes cooking or talking about cooking. Despite their constant dismay and badgering about when we're going to cook next, other teachers haven't seem to catch on that there's much more to cover: nutrition, costs, planning, business management, etc.

So far the department has had three separate teachers request that my students prepare food for their classes or clubs. One couldn't understand why a Thanksgiving meal was a crazy request, another was surprised to hear that catering for 100+ people would cost over $500, and still a third that wanted them to just cook something up for an even without a set date or number of people.

Having come from the industry after nearly a decade, I value hospitality greatly. And I really want to help build both my program and the community of the school. This runs counter to the last person who was hired that generally seemed to dismiss requests with some long-winded way of saying, "not my job." And I'm trying to address these requests without coming off the same way.

But what burns me up is how some of my colleagues will treat themselves to my room. I've had teachers come into my room and try to reheat lunches. One has made dismissive comments while interrupting meetings they assume are about "making brownies or whatever." I had to stop myself from telling them (a history teacher) that they must not be missing their own meetings since their class was just story time without the carpet.

The good news is that, despite not cooking every day, my students still like the class. We've got a lot of the difficult and lower-performing kids in the building as well as a handful of overachievers. There's not huge discipline problems or disrespect, which I can tell from behavioral data is not true of their conduct during the rest of the day.

I love teaching. It's a transition I wish I would've made earlier. And even though they won't drive me off, I'm hopeful that I can set expectations for me coworkers as well as I have for my students.

Submitted February 06, 2022 at 03:27PM by CoinkyDinkLinguine https://ift.tt/ZWvE6hI