I was quite surprised by how true this was when my wife started teaching high school math. I initially suspected 10~11 hours a day. Which I equated to my days of going to college full time and working construction full time -- easily 11-12 hour days, 6 days a week. She does so much more. Her typical schedule:
- 4:45am, awake
- 5:30am, out the door
- 6:00am, gets to school
- 6-8 she does whatever needs done for classes, meets with students, meets with peers or administration
- 8:00am, classes begin
- 9:30am, break time for 1hr 30 minutes -- but students will come in during this time to either make up tests, get extra help with something, or just do work. She can also have meetings (again) with peers, administration or sometimes parents.
- 11:00am, lunch for 1hr -- but again, students will usually come in to do whatever they need to do.
- 12:00pm, next class
- 1:30pm, next class
- 3:00pm, school's out
- 3-5, meetings with peers, getting ready for class tomorrow, emailing parents, handling disciplinary issues, prints lesson plans or whatever else needs done at school
- 5:30pm, home
- 6:00pm, eat and take a nap for however long she can get
- 8:00pm, wake up from nap, grade papers, enter in grades (if grades aren't posted online within 2 days she'll get about 5 emails a day from parents asking about it)
- 10:00pm, gets ready for bed
- 11:30pm, can finally get to sleep due to thinking/preparing for the next day.
She gets paid $36,000 a year. I have so much respect for her. Oh, I forgot to tell you -- all her lesson plans change each semester. They don't have books in half their classes -- they use a county wide "lesson plan" which must be printed out for each student. The school system believes in "evolving" education, so every semester they try to incorporate different topics or try to approach different methodologies. While I commend them for that, it negatively effects the teachers in excess busy work. If they used a printed book for 10 years in a row, she'd do it once and be done, with variations being in classes taught.
Come on, as someone who was a teacher for a while, lives with a teacher, and knows lots of teachers this is very atypical. Nobody would be doing all of these things every day, or even once a week. It is also quite common to have a number of free periods each day, one day a week I had 3 hours off.
judging by her salary and over-excitement, she must be new. After a while, she most likely will realize all that work is unnecessary and work more effectively (or burnout completely).
Almost all good teachers start out with something approaching that level of work. It is only by going through that phase that they have the backlog and repertoire ready in advance later on. It can be a brutally hard profession.
I know a teacher that has to regularly submit her hand-written lesson plans for the principal to review. That way the principal thinks she can be sure that the teachers are creating their own lesson plans late at night.
I do that kind of workload a couple of weeks a year at 'crunch' times in the UK academic calendar, I could not sustain that long term as a result of care responsibilities let alone exhaustion.
Suggest using those meetings with colleagues to explore team planning. Leverage a good lesson by using it with more classes at same level/subject.
Assessment ('grading' in American): any scope for MCQ or self/peer assessment?
- 4:45am, awake
- 5:30am, out the door
- 6:00am, gets to school
- 6-8 she does whatever needs done for classes, meets with students, meets with peers or administration
- 8:00am, classes begin
- 9:30am, break time for 1hr 30 minutes -- but students will come in during this time to either make up tests, get extra help with something, or just do work. She can also have meetings (again) with peers, administration or sometimes parents.
- 11:00am, lunch for 1hr -- but again, students will usually come in to do whatever they need to do.
- 12:00pm, next class
- 1:30pm, next class
- 3:00pm, school's out
- 3-5, meetings with peers, getting ready for class tomorrow, emailing parents, handling disciplinary issues, prints lesson plans or whatever else needs done at school
- 5:30pm, home
- 6:00pm, eat and take a nap for however long she can get
- 8:00pm, wake up from nap, grade papers, enter in grades (if grades aren't posted online within 2 days she'll get about 5 emails a day from parents asking about it)
- 10:00pm, gets ready for bed
- 11:30pm, can finally get to sleep due to thinking/preparing for the next day.
She gets paid $36,000 a year. I have so much respect for her. Oh, I forgot to tell you -- all her lesson plans change each semester. They don't have books in half their classes -- they use a county wide "lesson plan" which must be printed out for each student. The school system believes in "evolving" education, so every semester they try to incorporate different topics or try to approach different methodologies. While I commend them for that, it negatively effects the teachers in excess busy work. If they used a printed book for 10 years in a row, she'd do it once and be done, with variations being in classes taught.