I was so excited to see this documentary but to my surprise, I was extremely disappointed with it. This documentary was primarily focused on the fact that teachers don't make a lot of money and I'm here to tell you, that is NOT the problem with education. Not even close. Education is completely micromanaged...teachers do not have the flexibility and control like they used in their classrooms. As much as everyone likes to deny it, we are FORCED to teach to the test...our jobs and ultimately, our lives, depend on it. It is absolutely true that we are not educating kids for the future anymore..but that is not our fault. We are forced to teach a certain way, as some textbooks are literally scripted and we have to read it and present it as we see it in the book, regardless of how much we know the kids are NOT getting it. When administrators come in our classrooms, they are not looking for how the kids are doing in their regular day to day work. We are judged based on the activities we do, regardless of how much the kids are learning from it. Middle school teachers can have up somewhere around 130 students and we have to document just about everything we say to any child in a disciplining tone otherwise our word means nothing. We have to deal with parents running the school and forcing exceptions to rules. We are not respected and our work goes unappreciated. Forget the money! If all of this stuff was better and we were trusted to do our jobs as we were educated to do, (some of us with up to $80,000 of student loans from getting various Masters Degrees in education) we wouldn't care about the money because as I said earlier, we knew how much the pay was when we became teachers. That wasn't a surprise. On the other hand, how much we're not trusted or respected was. It's awful that none of this came up in this "documentary." This video makes us look shallow and greedy. The man in this video lost his wife because he was working two jobs? Why couldn't his wife get a job so he didn't have to work two jobs? It's awful that he's blaming teaching on losing his marriage. This video does NOT show what teachers go through on a regular basis at all. This is an awful interpretation to the problems in education. Try going to middle schools and asking a variety of teachers, rather than just 3 or 4. This was so disappointing!
Review of American Teacher
