Buying a good rating - How to succeed as a teacher

Teacher performance ratings can be purchased.

This one will infuriate some teachers, but let me say that on our school the rating system for teachers was ‘unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, exemplary.’ The last rating was reserved for teachers who were truly an example to other teachers. I knew of 4 teachers who had an ‘exemplary’ rating in my board. My wife and I were two of them. I won’t speak of my wife’s work - she was truly exemplary. But I spent far more of my own money than most other teachers. Therefore the classes looked better and I had a better program.

Spending your own money is foolish. Why do teachers do it? Because schools are underfunded. The type of person who goes into teaching does so typically because ‘they want to make a difference.’ So rather than letting the kids suffer, we pick up the slack and buy all the material the school should have provided. Suckers!

A tradesperson sometimes has to buy their own tools. They are tax deductible. Ours aren’t.

Could you imagine if you went into your office job and you had to buy your own paper, pens, notebooks, and pay your own money to photocopy things? How long would you continue to work there? Well, in teaching, that’s what they do. Put a stop to it!

Let me just say that spending your own money is a bad move.

But it can buy a great rating.