Teacher quits mid-semester and calls for change

[Jilly_in_VA]

NASHVILLE, Tenn-- She quit her teaching job in the middle of the semester, and now she’s calling for change.

It wasn’t an easy decision for Camille Fox, a former second grade teacher. She reached her breaking point just two weeks ago.

“I reached a point where I could not take another step forward into the piles of paper. And that’s the way I felt. I refused to step into this mountain of work another day,” said Fox.

After seven years in the profession, she walked out on a Friday and didn’t come back.

“I had to get out immediately for everyone’s good. For, for my students, for myself, for my kids, my husband, I had to make a selfish choice for once,” she said.

In an honest conversation with News 2’s Alex Denis, she explained the stress she felt was overwhelming from the pressure from state and district mandates as well as texting expectations, canned lessons, meetings, gradings, lesson planning, individual student time and parent conferences.

Read the rest here:
https://www.wate.com/news/education/former-teacher-reaches-breaking-point-calls-for-change/

This is why, people.

[Shellback Squid]

1. she's a single mother with a husband?

I believe her workload is unmanageable but the statements below contradict:


“I had to get out immediately for everyone’s good. For, for my students, for myself, for my kids, my husband, I had to make a selfish choice for once,” she said.

and the next

"The demands became unmanageable for Fox, who as a single mother with a Master’s degree, struggled to pay bills on her $3,000 a month salary"

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. That didn't make sense to me either

I think she may have recently got remarried and was a single mother before that. Unless she meant her ex, who shares custody. Either way, that salary is not enough.

[dutch777]

3. My only surprise is that there is not more of this. Demands on teachers only get more unreasonable

and the education of our kids suffer and by extension the knowledge base of our community is increasingly beggared. Teachers get a 5% pay raise and the class sizes grow. I was astonished to see recent teacher contracts where class sizes above 40 kids per class was allowed. I was an architect designing schools before I retired, and few have been designed with classrooms sized to accommodate more than 30 or 32 kids. And many studies over the years have noted that teacher to student ratios in classroom above 1:15 exponentially degrades quality of learning. Of course my niece and her husband teach HS in an urban high school nearby and most days only half the kids actually show up in the classroom so that "helps". And yet the non attendees get "alternative" options that allow them to graduate (and the school district to continue to get state $$$ for kids they really aren't educating). Sad state of affairs and I cannot imagine ho teachers work in such a damaged and dysfunctional system.

[jimfields33]

4. I had 42 kids in my class from 1974-1983 from k-8

It was fun for us. Not sure how the teacher stayed sane. One thing was teachers were respected by everyone. Not so much anymore.