Supersize my Job: Not!
By Grant Maher
Teaching and nursing have something in common: time compression. It happens like this: the teacher or nurse is first carefully instructed and drilled on how to properly teach or nurse. Then, the newly minted teacher or nurse goes out and gets a job.
The teacher promptly finds that she must work forty hours per week, and will teach a large quantity of students. Within days of beginning her new job, she will realize that she doesn’t have time to teach properly according to the tenets of her careful training. She must learn how to wing it, how to concentrate on what’s most important, how to pick her battles. Likewise the nurse; after careful and thorough training in the art of patient care, she will be put into an assignment that is too large to handle. Bed-baths, care plans, and empathy all go out the window in the rush to keep up with the essentials like medication.
It seems as if teachers and nurses are always being handed a “portion size” that is too large, and always being forced to bite off more than they can chew. The employer seems to say “take it or leave it. Accept the assignment or we’ll give it to someone else who will.” How in the heck did these two kinds of professionals lose their “portion control?” How do they get it back?
Nurses should have no more than six patients to care for at a time. Teachers really shouldn’t have to deal with more than twelve head at a pop of any age group. Work schedules should be around 30 hours a week, ideally. This way teachers and nurses can recharge their batteries and do things like write, nurture their families, and take time to visit with friends and to entertain. A person’s job should not dominate their schedule to an unreasonable degree. Any professional deserves a spacious, unrushed and un-hassled life.
“Yeah, right,” you might say. “That’s not going to happen.” And I say, “Well, why not?” Why do teachers and nurses take these artery-bursting assignments? Learn to say “no.” Let positions go unfilled until employers get the message—offer kinder, gentler assignments (and yes, pay a little less money) and the professionals will serve you well.
By Grant Maher
Teaching and nursing have something in common: time compression. It happens like this: the teacher or nurse is first carefully instructed and drilled on how to properly teach or nurse. Then, the newly minted teacher or nurse goes out and gets a job.
The teacher promptly finds that she must work forty hours per week, and will teach a large quantity of students. Within days of beginning her new job, she will realize that she doesn’t have time to teach properly according to the tenets of her careful training. She must learn how to wing it, how to concentrate on what’s most important, how to pick her battles. Likewise the nurse; after careful and thorough training in the art of patient care, she will be put into an assignment that is too large to handle. Bed-baths, care plans, and empathy all go out the window in the rush to keep up with the essentials like medication.
It seems as if teachers and nurses are always being handed a “portion size” that is too large, and always being forced to bite off more than they can chew. The employer seems to say “take it or leave it. Accept the assignment or we’ll give it to someone else who will.” How in the heck did these two kinds of professionals lose their “portion control?” How do they get it back?
Nurses should have no more than six patients to care for at a time. Teachers really shouldn’t have to deal with more than twelve head at a pop of any age group. Work schedules should be around 30 hours a week, ideally. This way teachers and nurses can recharge their batteries and do things like write, nurture their families, and take time to visit with friends and to entertain. A person’s job should not dominate their schedule to an unreasonable degree. Any professional deserves a spacious, unrushed and un-hassled life.
“Yeah, right,” you might say. “That’s not going to happen.” And I say, “Well, why not?” Why do teachers and nurses take these artery-bursting assignments? Learn to say “no.” Let positions go unfilled until employers get the message—offer kinder, gentler assignments (and yes, pay a little less money) and the professionals will serve you well.
posted by black hole | 8:00 PM
1 Comments:
I've done a lot of thinking about this subject in the last year. Our district wanted to include more "face time" with students in our contract negotiations. That means increasing our instructional day by 5 minutes. No teacher objected to this small amount of time, but to the more subtle message that we were not spending enough time doing our jobs.
I agree that we are taught to do one thing, but to accomplish the job, we do something else. We need to be brutally honest about what gets in our way. Most teachers want to put the students first; often to the detriment of their personal lives. Even if we are that self-sacrificing, it is not enough. The greater community seems to expect even more then.
I don't know what the answer is, but I suspect that we need to find a way be (as Jonathan said) concise and articulate. I would add loud.
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