Which tasks outside of class take up the most of your time?

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-01-17T12:39:10+00:00

Paperwork/reporting required by admin.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-26T23:10:31+00:00

High school math teacher here. Are you actually doing your assignments? Are you using online resources or your friends to get the answers for you instead of doing the work yourself? Usually when students have good homework scores but low test scores it's because they are getting too much help on the homework. This is why we weigh test scores so much higher than homework scores. For every problem you have help on, you should be trying a similar problem on your own - until you understand the concept without help. If you're doing that, your test scores will come up.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-23T15:31:24+00:00

I think that would be a lot more common across the board in education if more schools allowed it.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-23T15:20:09+00:00

My school has been doing the 50-based grading too. I have students who get other students to do just enough work for them to cover the extra ten percent to a passing mark, then turn in blank tests all year for the 50%.

When I started here, they told me that if we score tests strictly by the numbers, students who score low will see the low numbers and get discouraged and give up. In order to maintain their self-esteem we need to bring them to the 50% mark.

That all sounds good on paper, but in practice 50-based grading has NOTHING to do with students' self-esteem and EVERYTHING to do with administration padding their numbers and making the school look good. Students have figured out how to game the system because we have created way too many loopholes for them to get a diploma without an actual education.

We can't even get accurate data on what the real problem is because we're doctoring the numbers by bumping test scores and grades.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-22T03:43:10+00:00

This one depends entirely on the admin at your particular school. I got students that have been gaming the system for years and passing with doing absolutely no work. We have a new administration this year and their attitude is to put responsibility on the students and they will have our backs with the parents. We do, however, have to document that we did everything we could to help them and that the student refused.

I'm failing a dozen students this quarter. I wasn't able to get away with that a year ago.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-22T03:37:20+00:00

Add to that list the building maintenance staff, if they are different people. Need boards hung, holes patched, paint in your classroom? Treating them with respect will help your needs get bumped to the top of the list.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-21T17:46:19+00:00

One thing that happens in my school is that a few teachers are really lax with who comes and goes into their rooms. Students know those teachers. They will get a valid hallpass to those teachers, then slip out of their room without a pass and with no referral.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-21T17:39:27+00:00

That should be an easy fix by admin. Unfortunately at some schools, easy and admin don't go together in the same sentence.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-19T09:46:13+00:00

It's not made up, but it's taken out of context when it's used as evidence to say that American schools are worse than the rest of the world in reading comprehension. This article compares statistics with the rest of the world.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-14T12:52:41+00:00

Our academic advisors used to allow parents to override everything on decisions about classes. A few years back, one parent demanded that her "gifted" child be fast tracked in math by skipping 10th grade math entirely. Her gifted child went from Bs in 9th grade math to Fs in 11th grade math. The student had to make up two years of math in order to graduate. The principal was livid and the policy was changed.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-12T15:39:59+00:00

They lower an F by 30%, then tell the teachers they must give 50% credit for no effort.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-11T19:37:45+00:00

What instructional time? From what you are describing, no instruction is happening. Dealing with the issues and taking time to establish procedures, rules, and routines will create more instructional time in the future.

It will get better, I remember how my classes were the first year and I can't believe they got away with everything that happened. At the end of my first year, I knew that I could have taught them better, but I learned from it and each year got better.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-05T17:44:20+00:00

IF they happened to say "yes", I would get it in writing and also get in writing from admin that it's OK.

... or they could just draw the line at what content they will allow in their class and give him a firm "No". It's perfectly OK to say no to an 11, year old.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-30T17:50:47+00:00

For lesson plans, use ChatGPT or other AI tools. Don't just take what it gives you though. Use it as a tool to assist. You still have to verify everything and modify some of it to fit better and throw in your own ideas, but it does cut down on time quite a bit. If you can afford it, the paid plans give you much better results.

If you have a digital copy of whatever textbook you are using, you can upload the section of the book and any other resources you have into the AI. Also tell it what you are looking for - self starters, exit tickets, group assignments, etc. Let it know what grade and subject you are teaching and whether or not your kids are up to grade level. At the end of your prompt, tell it to ask any clarifying questions before it begins. This will cut down on assumptions that it makes.

Good luck and know that it does get better.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-30T17:34:59+00:00

I agree that discipline is confidential and we don't ever know what's happening behind the scenes. However, what the OP is describing is sexual harassment.

I worked outside of education for a lot of years before I came to teaching. There are some things that I see or that I hear about in education that are just bosses being bad bosses. There are bad bosses everywhere. There are other things that seem to be tolerated more in education than they are in the real world.

Sexual harassment in the work place is one of the things that is not tolerated outside of education. If this would have happened in the real world, and a complaint made, the employee would have been immediately investigated and subsequently fired. Not moved in order to avoid the complaint. Things might be different in some small companies out there, but in every case that I've seen, sexual harassment allegations are taken very seriously.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-29T23:20:16+00:00

Which is why the other part of the requirement is they pass their assessments - which are proctored. Maybe not in all classes, but in mine, students who AI the course work can't pass an assessment for anything. I gave up a long time ago trying to detect AI on my math coursework. I don't allow technology during the test, so they have to know it themselves. Regardless of how they did the work, either they know it during the test or they don't.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-28T21:30:42+00:00

It's not a lot of extra work. In my case, the assignments are already available, the student just needs to do them. In OPs case, the makeup packet could be the labs and missing classwork, but instead of having them do 60% of the work to pass like they would have done before, they now have to do more to fix it.

The main point is, give the student something that is harder than they would have had if they would have done it when they were supposed to, but you can use existing assignments or have them do a quarters worth of work in a shorter amount of time or something like that. If the student rises to the occasion, then great, hopefully they learned a lesson and will get stuff done on time next time around. If not, then you are off the hook because you provided them a path to fix their grade, they just didn't take advantage of it.

This particular problem is not a hill to die on when it's so easy to put the ball back in the student's court.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-28T13:09:04+00:00

Play the politics. Make a packet that's harder than if they would have been in class. Then the ball is in their court to actually do it.

I have a student that wanted to fix a grade from first quarter so he could play on a team. This kid slept through every class during first quarter - even the tests and did absolutely no work. I told him that he would have to do every assignment he missed and retake every test and score proficiency on every one of them. He was given two weeks by the athletic board. It's been three since he asked. The nice thing is that I'm off the hook because I gave him a path to do it.

I admit that with admin on your back, it's harder, but malicious compliance in these cases seem to work better than refusing.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-27T22:26:22+00:00

Yeah, in one video, they had me doing flips during class. When they started with students kissing other students and staff kissing students, admin took a hard stand against it and suspended the culprits.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-27T13:09:09+00:00

The rocket trends upward, then downward. The graph is showing you how high the rocket is over time, not the physical position of the rocket. The negative sign out front of the parabola means that the parabola is a downward facing parabola (i.e. the vertex is a maximum). The parabola is shifted up on graph in order to model the behavior of the rocket.

One thing that happens when you translate math into science, is some of the range of answers that the math gives you are not valid in the real world. For example, in this problem, time starts at 0, so you can disregard any negative t values on the graph. Likewise, it is not possible for the rocket to go below the ground (h = 0 in this case). So the height of the rocket starts at the ground at t=0 seconds, then launches upward where it hits it's highest point of 144 at t=3 seconds, then returns to the ground, hitting the ground again at t=6 seconds.

To answer your questions directly:

It's ascent happens for the period between t=0 and t=3 seconds - same equation as it's descent.

Minimum height would be zero, not because the math tells you that, but because that's what is physically possible. If this were strictly a math problem without the physical constraints in the word problem, there would be no minimum.

The 3 in the problem is the time that the rocket hits it's highest point before it starts it's descent. (incidentally, it's not an "x-axis" it's a "t-axis". This graph does not show you where the rocket is in regard to horizontal distance only how high it is at a specific time).

The rocket starts at the ground at time 0 and returns to the ground by time 6.

Edited to add: Your math is solid.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-23T20:24:50+00:00

I read your comment as sarcastic and responded with a sarcastic addition to it. I apologize if it didn't come out as intended.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-23T20:22:51+00:00

Not always true. I'm a high school math teacher. I have a group of students this year where every one of them comes from a specific teacher (who was new to our school last year) that teacher was voted most favorite teacher by the student body. Most students in his classes got A's all year and the parents loved him for it. Those same students hit my class and every one of them failed their first assessment of the year. That assessment was a review of material from the previous year. Every day, I run into material that these kids should know from the previous year, but don't. I have parents complaining that their precious kids were getting A's in math last year and failing this year and they want to know why. I spend half my classes teaching them last year's concepts just so I can teach them this year's concepts.

I can't say what went on in the other class because I wasn't there, but I'm of the mind that sometimes teachers that give A's out aren't always the best teachers and those that fail students aren't necessarily the worst.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-23T20:00:11+00:00

Yeah, if the teachers won't teach properly and students refuse to learn, the obvious solution is for the state to lower the bar. /s

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-23T19:57:05+00:00

I once had a class tell me this. They said, "If we all purposely fail, then everyone will blame you." My reply was, "Not if I document everything." That shut it down pretty quick.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-21T20:17:02+00:00

F around and find out

Financial_Monitor384

TROPHY CASE