We go to school every weekday, and school wouldn’t be school without our teachers. They teach us new things every day and make sure we know what we need to know. Whether it’s how to write an equation in slope intercept form for math or how to conjugate verbs in French, they never cease to surprise us with the amount of knowledge we can retain. We just follow our schedule to our classes and don’t even consider what a teacher’s day is like. They have a schedule too, and also homework – literally. Sometimes our teachers stay up half the night grading our papers and entering the grades in Home Access so we can have them the next day.

Our core class teachers teach five classes every day, a lunch/advisory period, and 2 off periods, but most of the time these are spent in conferences. Our elective teachers get 6 classes a day, an advisory/lunch period, and 1 off period but they usually don’t have conferences. “Some days we meet with our teams and other times we grade papers, read emails, call parents, get coffee, and just get caught up with everything,” Mrs. Callender said.

After the school day is over most of the teachers stay at least an extra 30 minutes to finish up lesson plans, send out an email, or grade papers. Sometimes you can see more than a hundred papers left for them to grade in a stack on their desk, and it can take a while to get through all of them. “Every once in a while I’ll stay a bit late and notice that quite a few teachers are still here working, even over 2 hours after school ends,” 7th grader Clementine Larrouilh said.

If you take a look at the school calendar you’ll notice there are quite a few dates labeled “student holiday,” and while we’re enjoying the time off, our teachers are working instead of spending time with their families. Since there are no students to teach at this time, all of the teachers go to meetings and workshops, or as it is officially called ”Professional Development,” and on early releases the same thing happens. Some days the teachers go to district meetings which are off campus, and they learn new things to help them teach us even better than they already do. “On days like early releases we get together as specific departments, such as social studies and even the whole grade, to see how kids are testing and we sometimes also make tests. In district development we learn new things as teachers, it can be about technology or other things that will help us,” Mr. Williams said.

There are more than 40 clubs at Canyon Vista, and they offer us even more opportunities than we’re already been given. In addition to all the work that our teachers do by being teachers, a lot of them also choose to sponsor and run a club just so that we can delve even further into our interests.

In conclusion, our teachers really do go the extra mile for us. They sacrifice a lot of their time when they shouldn’t be working, to do more for us – and quite a few of us haven’t taken time to appreciate it. The next time you get a bit more to do, think twice before complaining about your homework, because your teachers are working their hardest to set you up for success. Make sure to take this week as a cue to tell your teachers you really appreciate them for all they do!