2. Announcements during class time. For the first four years of my teaching career, I worked in a district where it was in the contract that no announcements could be made during class time other than regularly scheduled announcements during a set period. Consequently I started teaching not knowing the agony of having my class interrupted with announcements about homecoming, meetings, or sports cancellations, and then having student attention diverted to those topics rather than what they are supposed to learn. I always hear about cell phones being a distraction to students, but random announcements that could have waited until another time (or be made in another way) during a class can be just as much of a distraction from the real reason students are in the building. 3. Letting students talk among themselves for the last 5 minutes of class. I am known as the strict teacher because I believe in bell-to-bell instruction. I only have 50 minutes a day to cause understanding in my students, and I want to use all of that time. Some students and some teachers find this unreasonable of me.4. Pulling students out of class for things that are non-learning related. This school year alone I had students pulled out of class to talk about sports participation opportunities and to do something for an extra-curricular activity that was supposed to be done after school. I even had a student pulled out of my class during a test because another teacher simply demanded it. Now, I'm not against sports or extra-curricular activities; I feel they are a valuable part of a student's school experience. It's when they start to take priority over learning that I have a problem.
Marissa Utterberg on 12 May 13Week-long math, engineering, & science camp for high school girls.
