Survivor: Education!

I read the following article in our school's weekly newsletter and thought it was amusing, so had to share it here. Keep in mind that it is a bit "American", but it still fits in well with teachers everywhere. What are your thoughts on it?

Have you heard about the next planned Survivor show?

Three businessmen and three businesswomen will be dropped into a primary school classroom for six weeks. Each business person will be provided with a copy of the curriculum, and a class of 28 students.

Each class will have five learning-disabled children, three with A.D.D., one gifted child, and two who speak limited English. Three will be labelled with severe behaviour problems.

Each business person must complete lesson plans at least three days in advance with annotations for curriculum objectives and modify, organise and create appropriate classroom resources.

They will be required to teach students, handle misconduct, implement technology, document attendance, write referrals, correct homework, make bulletin boards, compute grades, complete report cards, document benchmarks, communicate with parents and arrange parent conferences.

They must also supervise recess and lunch and monitor the hallways. In addition, they will complete drills for fires or other emergencies.

They must attend workshops, faculty meetings, union meetings, and social studies into the program. They must maintain discipline and provide an educationally stimulating environment at all times. The business people will only have access to the golf course on weekends, but on their new salary they will not be able to afford it anyway. There will be no access to vendors who want to take them out to lunch, and lunch will be limited to 20 minutes.

On days when they do not have recess duty, the business people will be permitted to use the staff restroom as long as another teacher is supervising their class. They will be provided with two 60-minute planning periods per week while there students are learning elsewhere. If the photocopier is operable, they may make copies of necessary materials at this time.

The business people must continually advance their education on their own time, and pay for advanced training themselves. This can be accomplished by moonlighting at a second job or marrying someone with money.

The winner will be allowed to return to his or her job.

The scary thing is that so many parts of this joke, are actually true. So many people think that teaching is an easy job; I would love to see what they thought of it if they actually stepped inside the room and did our job for a single day.

I would love to give them a handful of our syllabus documents and have them take a look at what we need to teach their children. I would love for them to see how often their darlings are distracted, are cheeky or are downright naughty. I would love to see how they keep their eye on a classroom full of children at once.

So this is a shoutout to all the teachers out there, infants or secondary - what you're doing isn't easy and you are so, so important. And hey, let's think about it - if this really was a Survivor game, we'd be easy contenders for that one million dollars!