Just Wondering?

I have always been taught the old adage, “you can work harder, or you can work smarter”. With that in mind, I must first say, I truly believe that we as teachers must be; highly knowledgeable in our areas of instruction, dedicated to our professions, prepared to teach whenever we enter the classroom and devoted to stimulating students to succeed. Also, I like almost everything that I am learning about Working on the Work, creating engaging lessons and lesson plans and giving clear and appropriate evaluations, etc. But as almost everyone has expressed, all of this places an enormous burden on every teacher that spills over into their home life to the point that many are being encouraged by their family to find another career.

Instead of teachers working harder, why aren’t we being allowed to work smarter? Let me explain. When I took over teaching drafting, I acquired a closet full of old drafting junk that I was asked to go through and clean out. Among the rubble I found a complete set of the Drafting curriculum that was created by the University of Georgia and was provided by the State of Georgia to be used to teach the Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Drafting Classes. The teacher’s books were provided with all lesson plans, tests and teaching objectives. The student workbooks contained study blocks which listed all of the requirements that the students needed to complete in order to meet each objective. Reading materials, worksheets and scripts for a slide show were also provided for each study block. It was designed to accompany a text book. All of the material was reproducible. This curriculum allowed for the teacher to instruct the class as a group or for the student to work ahead at his own pace. Students were required to show competency in each book before they could move to the next study block. Either way, it insured that every student received the training that the state required before moving on to the next level. You see, teachers were then provided with all of the tools they needed to achieve almost all of the requirements that teachers are now being expected to create for themselves today. As one of the students who took those classes, back in the day, I know that we were better prepared to enter the workplace than our students are today. I believe that that anyone can do any thing as long as they have the proper training, proper tools and material and enough time, which leaves me with one question. Why does each of us need to create our own wheel?