The job of an elementary school teacher has changed quite drastically over the years, as new ideas about how to teach have been presented.Also, as technology has changed, so too have the methods used to teach elementary school children. The challenges for the elementary school teacher have grown too despite the move to reduce the number of children in each class. Whereas the initial focus was on getting all the children to read, there is now more time spent on helping some students adjust to a different language and different cultures. It is far from the relatively easy employment it was years ago!
Elementary teachers have to make them understood to students who have English as a second language, so the pressures are on for these children not just to deal with the elementary school curriculum, but to handle the learning of English and the way to write the characters of the alphabet too, as well as encouraging these students to talk in a language that is foreign to them. Even in a classroom with only 10 students, say, the amount of individual attention that an elementary teacher can give each student is small.
Consider this, if a day consists of 6 school hours, then that is 360 minutes, shared between those 10 students, so a mere 36 minutes each child. Of course class sizes are likely much higher than this, so the individual time available for each student goes down. Then there are certain programs that are in place every day where individual attention is not available to any students, for example during the music program, or when reading to the whole class. This means that the job of an elementary school teacher is not all about teaching these young children, but it is a great deal about time management and making sure that no child slips through the cracks in the education system. And this means that the training for elementary school teachers has to reflect this need to help teachers get the most out of their days in the classroom
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