Non-teachers: do you expect teachers to work during off-hours?

In My Humble Opinion
81

As I have argued before, I don’t think there is any point in worrying about how teaching “compares” to other professions in terms of work-load and pay. We don’t do that with anything else. If we have a surplus of qualified, capable teachers, then that means teachers are overpaid. If we have a shortage of qualified, capable teachers, then teachers are underpaid. There’s no point in trying to come up with some platonic ideal of what teachers “should” be paid based on the work load. This logic suggests that teachers in some areas and fields are overpaid, and in others are underpaid. I am pretty comfortable with that conclusion.

The “clock-hours” think grows out of a vicious cycle between the teacher’s organizations and the school districts, both of whom want to describe teachers as hourly employees when it suits their rhetoric and both of whom want to describe teachers as professionals when it suits their rhetoric.

So my district wants to call me an hourly employee and argue they can assign me duties for every minute of every hour, and make me thumb in and out on a biometric clock, and refuse any flexibility about that for anyone for any reason, but want to treat us as professionals when it come to taking responsibility for getting our work done on time, whatever that takes, or attending training or after-school meetings, or whatever. So if someone wants to come into work 10 minutes after our start time–even though that’s still 30 minutes before school starts–because they have a kid to drop off, or they want to regularly leave right at the end of the school day, instead of waiting the 15 minutes before our official day ends, in order to make a grad school class–that’s not acceptable because we are hourly. But even if there is no time for planning built into the beginning of the school year, they still expect you to start with a room that is polished and lesson plans done, because hey, you are a professional.

At the same time, the teacher’s organizations/unions go the opposite way: if a school is requiring teachers come up on Saturday to scrape gum off desks (true story!), the organizations are all “You can’t do that! It’s not a contract hour!”. But when teachers are being micro-managed, it’s “Wait! Teachers are professionals! You have to treat them as such!”

Basically, both sides have a vested interest in switching descriptions as needed, and so both will continue, and the profession has developed a sort of schizoid tick because of it. People don’t even notice it anymore, we just all switch all the time.

82

The point was the comparison could be with other salaried employees OR it could be with other people that are expected and paid for working 8-5 five days a week.

But lets go with the salaried people. I’ve worked salary and no salaried position requires 50-60 hrs per week for 40 weeks. maybe 50-70 hours for a week or two at the end of a long project but not for 10 straight months.

83

You should try working in accounting. 80+ hour weeks for four months a year are not at all unusual.

And my wife’s job at as an Executive Assistant at a private school had her there 50 hours a week during the school year. Only during the summer did she actually work 40 hour weeks.

84

I know there are always exceptions but when people say that salaried people also work 50-60 hours a week it’s practically guarantied that one of two things is true

  1. It’s for a couple of weeks once or twice a year. OR
  2. They get paid a fuckload of money for their salary.
85

Why does it matter what job is the hardest? I mean, none of that is as shitty and miserable as the schmuck doing 40 hours a week during the day at McDonalds and 40 hours a week at Burger King on nights and weekends. And fuck, there are people with Master’s degrees in Social work making $30K a year to go into actual crackhouses to pull screaming babies out of their mother’s arms. There is no metric–not on hours worked, degree of education, contribution to society, or level of education–were they are not “deserving” of more than I make.

And you can’t compare “teaching” as if it’s one job to “corporate job” as if it’s one job. Both are meaningless generalizations. I know teachers that work a pretty easy 40 hour week, and I know teachers that put in a genuine 70 hour week. I am sure the same is true for different “corporate jobs” as well.

86

This is not supported by the best data I’ve been able to find here and here.

87

OK, I’m a retired teacher. My hours were 7:45-3:45. Lunch was 25 minutes long, and it was the only time when you might not be expected to be in a supervisory mode instead of teaching or planning. Also, the contract was for 190 days. Paychecks came on the last working day of each month, spread out over 12 months.

I usually could get most of my grading done at work, but I’d have to do some at home two or sometimes three nights a week. The only thing I promised overnight returns on were tests (but not for makeup tests). However, I usually taught Physical Science, which is one of the most objective subjects out there. All tests were multiple choice and written in the style of Georgia’s End-Of-Course Test (say that really fast a few times for a chuckle!) since it carried so much weight. Don’t think for a minute that the questions were simple recall- most required using problem solving skills.

However, many teachers do not have the luxury of giving multiple-choice tests. English and Social Studies teachers are among them. Anyone who doesn’t understand that grading 150 essay question type tests necessarily takes longer than overnight can go self-righteously fuck themselves.

Things have changed in Georgia since I retired- there now is a thing called TKES that seems to require writing tomes of paperwork in order to teach a week’s worth of lessons. Certain factions in the state government seem to think that teachers should be made to work constantly in their waking hours. Of course, these are people who never had to do such who are making these requirements. Since I’m retired, they too can go fuck themselves.

I don’t normally resort to vulgarity, but the Stossel types really get me pissed off.

88

I did not vote. My vote would have been teacher should be working out side of class room time. But not the just work until you get it done it is your job. If the school is adding to the work load then there should be limits.

There is grading papers
Class prep time and other work to be done.

89

I agree with you in the most general sense. Like I said, I come from a long line of teachers. What I don’t like is the general meme that teachers do not get paid enough these days. It is true is some isolated places and completely untrue in most places. Single teachers make more than the average household income in most states with just a few years of experience. A pair of married teachers is very solidly upper-middle class in most states as well. That is opposite of what the general perception is.

I am not opposed to paying teachers more as long as you get the quality but the fact is that education majors and teachers in general tend to have below average intelligence by any objective measure. I know that doesn’t apply to you but it is true overall. My home town in Louisiana had a huge natural gas strike directly under it. One of the first things they did was raise the average tenured teacher’s pay into the mid-70’s with a few making over 100K. They also spent a few million on a new football stadium complete with AstroTurf for a town of 1,600 people.

What does that get you overall? The teachers are quite wealthy now because it is a low cost of living area. Most of them are married to other teachers so they have ridiculous household incomes for the area and yet they are the same mediocre teachers that I had when I was growing up. I love them but the money certainly didn’t change anything about their teaching style and the new football stadium didn’t help anyone prepare for college either.

My mother is a renowned author and international speaker on secondary school education. I talk to her about these things a lot. The point both me and my stepfather have tried to persuade her about is that paying existing teachers more will do nothing for the students. The only way to serve them using money as a tool is to greatly tighten up the standards and scholarship required to be a teacher in the first place.

I agree with you in general though. There is no value judgement involved in how much money each position should pay. Let the market decide but that isn’t happening right now.

90

All I can tell you is that what teachers get paid in my state is not attracting anything like the best and the brightest into the profession, and that saying “these teachers suck! We aren’t going to pay more until we see improvement” really misses the point. The problem isn’t that standards and scholarship aren’t tight enough. The problem is that standard and scholarship have to be loosened to accommodate the only people willing to do the jobs. I have been involved in a lot of hiring decisions over the years, and we have NEVER had to chose between two people we’d really have liked to have hired. We’ve had a few we were really happy to hire, and a few times we’ve had to chose between a couple equally mediocre, but I have never seen two excellent candidates at the same time–they are that rare.

And stories of tons of applications miss the point. It’s not a playing-the-odds game. Overall, the quality of the people attracted to teaching is low because the pay is low compared to what good people could be making doing the same amount of work in other fields. Yes, there may be districts where they get tons of applications, but 1000 mediocre people applying for a job is no more useful than one. Though I have to say, in my experience, most schools–with the exception of middle-class suburban enclaves–don’t even get that. My district has plenty of vacancies where no one even minimally qualified was willing to take the job. Skimming the district website, I see 300 elementary vacancies alone–even in this economy. There’s multiple elementary schools with 5-6 openings. How on earth can teachers be “overpaid” if that’s happening?

There is this drive in education to get rid of bad teachers. Everyone wants to get rid of bad teachers. And lord knows, there are some bad teachers. But there isn’t a whole lot better out there to replace them. For generations, teaching benefited from being one of the few places where an ambitious, highly intelligent woman could excel. Now all those women are becoming doctors and lawyers and engineers and business consultants. They make the decision not to be teachers when they themselves are in high school (or, more likely, never consider it) because they see nothing in teaching to attract them, and they, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, have other options.

People think that the problem with bad teachers is that you “can’t get rid of them”. But that’s rarely true, and it certainly isn’t true on a macro level. If there were tons of good, effective teachers out there competing for jobs, those bad teachers would find themselves driven out and marginalized more and more, and while no workplace is ever free of a few inexplicable duds, they would do a lot less damage. But what I see today is mediocre teachers put into positions of greater responsibility and influence because they are literally all that there is.

91

If they assign homework, then, yes. How much work is proportional to how much homework they assign. And that was my opinion before reading the thread.

Also, there’s no reason grading homework has to be all or nothing. Just do spot checks at points where the student won’t be able to anticipate. If it looks like they just scribbled some gibberish, check and see if they did that elsewhere in the work, and, if so, don’t give them credit for the assignment.

And I’m actually for assigning optional homework, just make it clear that that’s what you are doing. I honestly hated having to do homework when I already understood the material, and that was the one thing that actually lowered my grades. This was the only reason I ever resorted to the scribble method of homework, and even that was only my senior year in calculus, and only at the prodding of a friend. And, even then, we made sure we could do the problem before we moved to that method. (We also would sometimes split the homework, having each of us copy the other’s work.)

92

Why? People keep saying this, and I don’t understand the logic at all.

For several years, I taught an AP Microeconomics elective to kids who were concurrently enrolled in my AP Macro class. The nature of the kids and the course was such that virtually no homework was required. Does that mean those kids did not deserve my time and attention, my outside of class time spent prepping and going over their classwork to see not just if it were correct but what sorts of patterns of errors were occurring? Because they certainly needed all that to pass the test.

On the other hand, I teach AP English Lit. To pass that test, they MUST read 5-6 serious novels, they MUST spend class time talking about them, they must write often, they must go over dozens of poems and short passages. It simply cannot all be done in the classtime allotted And while I also spend a ton of time in that class grading and prepping and thinking, I am sure that the top students, at least, are spending more time than I am.

I just cannot see the logic that I am giving the first set of students more than they deserve but I am somehow doing the second set of students a disservice.

93

In fact, in these parts, that’s explicitly stated for teachers, at least at the level where I teach (high school - not sure how it is for, for example, elementary school teachers). Full-time is 1800 hours for everyone, but teachers have more weeks of vacation and are therefore expected to work more hours per week. A result of this is that many teachers choose to work less than full-time, which means of course they get paid less than a full-time salary.

94

About teacher pay.

While it is true that a teacher makes more money and has better benefits than anyone else with the ink still wet on their diploma, it doesn’t translate increases in salary comparable to other professions as you get better. I have two master’s degrees in my field, hold dual-certifications in hard-to-fill fields (math and special ed), am finishing up my EdD in math ed, have over 15 years experience and the highest certification a teacher can have (NBCT) and yet I make less than $20,000/year (less than 70% increase) more than when I first walked into a classroom. I don’t say that to brag but to point out that teacher’s pay doesn’t work like other professions. We have higher entry-level pay and lower monetary incentive to improve ourselves in our line of work.

And now that pay-for-performance is the law in my state, that will get even worse. Expect Colorado to lose many experienced teachers in the next 5 years to be replaced with TFA and 23 year-olds with BAs in education. I was in one district that did it and all it was was an excuse to pay teachers less by gaming the system so they could not get an “excellent” evaluation and the pay in that district was $10-$20,000 less per year for experienced teachers than the surrounding districts.

95

Update on the poll.

If you have kids in K-12, work until you’re done is leading your time is your own by a 2-1 margin. For those that do not have kids in K-12, it is split 50/50.

Does that say something about your views if you have kids in school as opposed to not in school?

96

You don’t understand because you’re looking at a specific situation and your classes and how you teach. If a teacher assigns my child five hours (for the average child) of “mandatory, must be handed in ,lowers your grade if it’s not done” homework per week, then I expect that teacher to spend however long it takes to actually correct that homework - and if it means working evenings and weekends as it probably will, so be it. Otherwise the homework is being assigned for the sake of assigning it . If instead a teacher bases the grade for the course on test scores alone and any homework assignments are optional , I wouldn’t expect that teacher to spend as much time working evenings and weekends as the first teacher. And I would expect a teacher who assigned two hours of homework a week to fall somewhere in between. The “proportional” refers to the amount of work assigned, not how much time individual students spend on it.
Based on my memories of both my own and my children’s education, high school English teachers are the least likely to assign homework without grading it. In the lower grades and other subjects (particularly math) it happened all the time - do this page of math problems in the textbook, write these spelling words ten times each and use them in a sentence, answer the five questions at the end of chapter 10 etc ,for no reason other than to hand it in and have it returned moments later after it was recorded as complete. And the kid who rarely hands in the homework but scores 90 on every test or other graded assignment gets a C.

97

Teachers are ridiculously underpaid, and they work way more hours than they get credit for. But then, I don’t know anybody who works less than 50 hours a week, and we are all ostensibly paid for 40. I have gone whole months where it was more like 80 hours a week.

It’s not right for any of us, and it’s one of the worst things about the USA. My Irish cousins work 35 hours per week and get 5 weeks vacation plus all Holidays. they are 100% covered for sick days - as many as they need. My last job offered 14 days of combined vacation/sick leave.

While it’s true that most people underestimate how many hours teachers put in, it’s also true that most teachers have no real concept of how much the rest of us work. No, I’m sorry, I can’t assemble craft supplies for you this week; I’m down to four hours sleep per night and still behind on the laundry.

98

I am not seeing the connection. Yes, a teacher should not assign homework if the homework is just busywork. Nor should they assign even potentially useful things if they won’t be able to give feedback and without feedback the work is useless. Nor should they assign things that are useful but an inefficient way of learning, nor things that are useful but outside the scope of the course. They should always be aware when they are asking a student to commit time outside of class, and make each requirement only when it is beneficial and necessary to succeed in the course.

But whether or not an assignment is required, I have the same obligation as a teacher to get it back in a timely fashion: whether or not a student HAD to sit up completing it doesn’t change whether or not I have to sit up grading it. If an assignment completed entirely in class requires meticulous grading, that’s my job. If an assignment completed at home can be effectively graded by scan-tron, that’s fine too.

What I think people are saying is “If my kid has to do homework for three hours after school, those teachers grade homework, too. That’s only fair”. I think that’s a false analogy. I think it makes about as much sense as “If students can’t go off campus for lunch, teachers shouldn’t either”. I mean, if a football coach knows his team needs to be doing conditioning all summer to have a winning team in the fall, does that mean he’s gotta be at the gym every day before he can expect the same from them? He’s not the one that’s going to be out on the field.

99

Manda Jo , what i’m saying is that i expect a literature teacher who is assigning mandatory essays and other written work to spend more time grading than a math teacher who assigns optional homework as practice, doesn’t even collect it and grades his tests by scantron. Not because i demand it but because certain assignments take more time to grade and because there’s no point in assigning work that won’t be graded.

100

Teachers in the UK have to do horrendous amounts of paperwork. They also get less holiday than U.S. teachers, I think. So I’d say “yes, some extra time w/should be expected, but not nearly the amount they actually do”.