December is a special time at school. Concerts, Christmas lights, outings, missions, discos. There is so much that my head is spinning. There is so much you can’t digest. And most importantly, it is not clear who and why so much is needed. Kids? So they curse all this activity after the first event. Then teach poetry, then rehearse the dance. Parents? It’s really hard to find a more interesting leisure activity than running around the shops in search of a pirate hat for a performance. Teachers? I wrote and broke with nervous laughter, my eye twitching. I want to shout: how much? How much fun can you have with your last effort?
I am a teacher and a parent. And I don’t understand what’s going on on either side. Yes, and as an old boy – a lot. The child in me becomes, as it is fashionable to say now, a ball of imaginary pictures in the crowd, every day to the Christmas tree, the museum, or the dances, where everything is friendly. If that was the case when I was a kid, I’d still stutter, to be honest. But let’s not exploit possible childhood injuries, there are already enough predators. Let’s talk like adults.
Let’s look at this dire situation from the perspective of educators. It’s no secret that many teachers today work for a wage and a half or two. This is too much. This means six to seven lessons a day plus checking notebooks, preparing materials, reports, journals, meetings, courses and methodological associations. And then he is invited to be on duty at the disco until 9-10 in the evening, to go on a weekend excursion with the class, to go to the theater.
It gets to a ridiculous point. Here, during the fall holidays, schools had to find out what the kids do in their spare time, and God forbid, if everything is sad, then organize something. Now even more fun. Now we are talking about the winter holidays. So, if it was still possible to go on a trip with the class instead of sitting on the methodology council in the fall (otherwise, all holidays for teachers are scheduled for work events), now it is not at all clear what the authorities swayed on the teachers’ statutory holidays.
No, if it is for an additional payment, or rather, if it is doubled as it should be in case of overtime, if it is for leave, you can consider offers of hard work in the first days of January. But in most schools, nothing like this is simply provided. In very rare institutions, the administration somehow goes out and compensates for the processing of teachers with something pleasant. More often than not, teachers are reassured that it is their sacred duty to be with students at all times. And from all sides. On the one hand, the bosses who shame the employees who do not want to work for free, and on the other hand, the parents are putting pressure.
They say how educational work it is to work for free after school hours. They prove that this is inseparable from the educational process. They explain this without it, nowhere.
Children will not learn the multiplication tables, they will not learn the rules of conjugation of nouns without going to nature or a museum with their favorite classroom teacher. And if the teacher is against it, then of course he does not like children. Interesting movie.
It seems that the idle time problem is solved very simply. Nothing seems to prevent you from arranging a departure every three months at the appointed time. There will be no significant gap in knowledge resulting from missing six classes in two months. So this is possible. They do. But it turned out that this is not enough and you also need to find something on weekends, evenings and holidays. But why shouldn’t children spend this time with their parents? More useful. And here it begins. They ask: What about working parents?
Damn it! Since when have working parents equated with nonexistent parents? No, really, it’s like I’m working in a regular school district and sometimes I feel like I’m in an orphanage. Or, you know, in a commune school. Remember, at the beginning of the 20th century there were many such people who were retraining homeless children. But we seem to live in a different time, don’t we? A little more prosperous, right? Or not?
No, no questions are asked if teachers work with orphans. The unfortunate, the needy do not get offended. Cultural leisure, the right to develop outside the school walls cannot be violated. The task of the responsible officials is only to organize everything competently and, again, to provide teachers with a reasonable wage for this hard work. But if we’re talking about ordinary families, isn’t it time to return the children to the same families? What does it mean – parents work? All business. Maybe if a person has a family, he can no longer afford to be a workaholic? Maybe he should look for a five-day job that’s eight hours a day?
Please don’t rub your hands and say that people have to work without rest because of poverty. Poor kids don’t go on trips. Yes, it’s unfortunate if they don’t go anywhere with their parents (even if it’s free), but school can’t help here anyway – these are social policy issues. The truth is, most of the activities in the classroom are not cheap at all. Group trips to museums on charter buses have long become more expensive than individual trips. And significantly – three to five times. Iced tea parties wouldn’t be complete without the ready meals delivered. For school performances, parents need to reserve costumes. It turned out to be money. What not? Time? No, I don’t believe it can ever be carved. Maybe there is no desire?
Yes it looks like that. Now I’m going to write something bad. Most of the time, group activities in the classroom are pretty boring. Bored children, sad faces of guides, who can’t move these children sent by adults to “raise” them. Everyone asks when is lunch on buses, in museums and if there will be nuggets. Event organizers are forced to increase the degree of attraction day by day. But this only makes the situation worse. Guides tell tales, run around with bags in museums, in the theater, even in the puppet theatre, humor is now on the verge of foul. The students are animated for a moment, then bored again. They don’t want all of that, they want Burger King and the mall playground. In general, children always want what they are used to, they cannot ask for what they do not know.
They will say: this was written by an angry and offended teacher. All right, I’ll act as a parent. I am one of those parents whose children hardly participate in extracurricular activities at school. Expensive (and I’m poor), uninteresting, pointless. I believe without shame that I can organize free time more exciting and more useful for my children. And I will organize. And by the way, it’s not just for her kids. I often offer my students some outings as part of a journalistic circle, go to free or purely budget museums, take walks in parks, and tell the history of the place myself. I don’t recommend such sorties only to journalists, but I have one condition: I only take those who are really interested. I’m asking students, not parents. Even if schoolchildren are exempted from the last lessons, it is usually 10-15 people who wish. And that’s fine – it’s more comfortable in small groups.
But I’m getting off topic. I moved on to consider the phenomenon of mass extracurricular activities from a parent’s perspective. You understand that I do not like them and do not push my children there. There doesn’t seem to be a problem. Don’t join if you don’t want to. But no, they impose. There are calls to stay with the team like in the bad old days. “If we take a group of 35 we get a 5% discount, why are you so inactive?” And turning off notifications doesn’t help. They call, convince: “Oh, Petya fell ill with us, they do not return the money for the tour. Do you want to take his place? Just two thousand rubles. I don’t want. I want to spend my weekends with my family and friends. Not in a crowd of forty.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.