There are costs associated with every job. Sometimes it is the cost of getting to and from the place of work. Sometimes it is the cost of time. Time away from the family, hours of travel time, long hours of work, work in your home office, when you cannot interact with your loved ones as you focus on the task in hand.
There is nothing more disheartening to realise that your employer does not recognise or even appreciate this extra sacrifice. In many cases, it is taken for granted that you will give give give without a word, and that is perhaps just the way it is.
After 33 years of working in the same job, I certainly feel this awful feeling of having been taken for granted. And it is possibly because teachers do not ask for enough. They are expected to be sacrificing so much for their "calling."
The latest added cost for teachers is the cost of the Internet at home that they are all meeting, in order to prepare lessons for their students. Faced with inadequate school time and Internet bandwidth at school, they move like sacrificial lemmings to their homes, where they pay for the Internet services of uploads and downloads and sometimes even software out of their own pockets. They use their own phones, and their cameras and their video recorders and often their own ink and paper for printing, on top of all of the other costs that they meet daily. I am sure I am only just scratching the surface here.
So the 21st century learning going on in our schools is being subsidised heavily by teachers. Wouldn't it be nice if that were recognised let alone paid for?
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Location:Wembley Place,Richmond Heights,New Zealand
