Tilden Preparatory reviews

Hard to make a liveable wage, students can be dropped from your schedule with no notices or valid reasons, which negatively impacts your take-home pay.

Intense amounts of student-facing work with very little prep time. Although I personally have never had an issue of being underscheduled, there are no guaranteed hours, and in order to get priority scheduling with students you need to be available for 35-40 hours of in-class time per week (25+ will get you healthcare). This can easily amount to more than a dozen different classes because most are 50 minutes 2-3 times per week. These classes are likely spread across several subjects and grade levels (though some may be study support, which luckily requires very little prep), which is definitely not boring but also a larger mental load. Besides the ten minute passing periods, you get 1 hour of prep time per ten hours of class time, so 3-4 hours of prep per week total, paid at $20/hr rather than your usual rate. This kind of counting hours applies everywhere; department heads, for example, only get 1 hr per week of additional time to do their (considerable) duties. It's important to note that one-on-one teaching is both less tiring and really a lot easier to prep for/do off the cuff than teaching a whole class, but that is still a very high ratio of class time to prep time. The union has been fighting for more prep time; it used to be one hour of prep per 15 hours of class time. In order to make this possible, admin requires that you do grading, writing daily progress notes, coming up with projects, etc in class with your student or while your student does independent work. There is some value there, but it can feel like cutting corners, as the vast majority of students I have already struggle to get through the curriculum at a reasonable pace in their very limited instructional time. While it is not my job to push students through at a specified pace, I do want to use their time well, and I find myself in distance learning squeezing prep to allow myself to do grading out of class. Note that the school does provide premade tests, labs, and assignments (less so in distance learning, but the campus is beginning to carefully reopen) which is very helpful and is what allows this to happen. Still, because it is individualized, I often want to make adjustments or craft my own assignments. To be fair, some of my more experienced coworkers do not feel that they even need all of the prep they have been allotted. But I think most teachers would prefer more, and I believe that some even do extra unpaid prep in secret, especially in distance learning. I do not do that, mainly because I am fairly comfortable just winging a class, talking based on the book and where the student is at, though I always feel I could've done more. (Such may be the life of the teacher.) It gets easier after you've taught the same class a few times. I spend a lot of time updating admin and parents on students' pacing (it's self-paced and they are usually not allowed to move on until they reach 80% mastery). The good news here is that students can't be left behind (and that's very good news!). However because parents pay by the hour and because in my experience the vast majority of students fall behind the estimated course outline pace (many take 150% or even 200% longer, which starts to feel like a slog), parents can get quite anxious. The worst of that usually goes through admin, but a lot goes through me, and I find I'm sometimes fielding some very unrealistic expectations. Note that parents do not have access to your phone, and you can bill for excessive parent communication. You'll do well if you prefer bounded work hours even if they're more intense and if you don't mind doing a lot of thinking on your feet and switching between myriad classes and curricula.