Last night, I was thinking back to elementary school and how (IIRC) things like PE, music, and art were one day a week for an hour. So I did the math, and it came out to around 14 hours of classroom instruction a week. (My math was as follows: there are six grade levels, K-5. Some places are K-6, but I’m not sure if I even took these classes in Kindergarten, so let’s just say 6 to keep things simple. There were two classes for each grade level, so that would be 12 classes. Then I believe there were two special education classes, one for lower grade levels and one for higher grade levels, to make a total of 14 classes. At one hour of classroom instruction that’d be 14 hours.)
I would imagine that there’d also be a fair bit of curriculum development, since you would be teaching different things to different grade levels. I would also assume that there’s probably not as much grading of assignments in an arts class as opposed to general education.
What I’m wondering is, do teachers of the arts really only have about two days worth of classroom time? If so, is it still considered a full-time job? Do teachers only have to come into the classroom a couple days a week? (I do remember that there were sometimes two different PE teachers or two different music teachers, which makes me wonder if the teachers taught at different schools on different days.) Or is my entire premise wrong? Because if the teachers taught each class for two hours instead of one, then it’d equal up to about the same amount of classroom time as a general education teacher.
It’ll depend on the size of the school, of course. In a larger school, there might be enough classes to keep an art teacher busy full-time, or even multiple teachers. And of course some schools have art more than once a week. In a small school, there are a variety of approaches. The art teacher might be part-time, or they might teach both art and something else, or they might teach at the elementary school, middle school, and high school.
I have a niece who became a middle-school art teacher maybe 5-6 years ago in a medium-sized school district in SE OK. She often says how little time she has for planning and other teacher-stuff with all her classes.
She was very thrilled to take part in the Oklahoma Teacher Strike earlier this month, saying it was much easier than all her classes
You are missing what the art teacher means to a school administrator. The art teacher provides that planning time for all the other teachers. So, he/she gets to see all of the students in the school, not just a few. Each individual student may come to art only one hour per week, but that teacher is seeing different groups of kids all day long, every day. While the students are in PE/art/music, the other teachers on the campus get their planning time.
That’s why I specified elementary school teachers, though. Based purely on my own experience and what I remember, arts teachers in middle school taught just as many classes as a teacher of any other subject. It was only in elementary school where I recalled that your classroom teacher would teach multiple subjects throughout most of the day (like English and social studies and math and science), but the PE teacher would teach PE and that’s it. And while they did teach multiple age groups, it didn’t seem to equate to as much teaching time.
You seem to be defending the value of an art teacher to the rest of the school, and that’s never something I was arguing. I’m merely asking a question of how it works out logistically, if the elementary school art teacher teaches as many classroom hours as a gen ed teacher, and if not, if that affects anything like their full-time status or the amount of hours that they need to be in the school or anything else like that.
Two classes per grade is a very small school. The average school is 50% larger than that. That means three classes per grade per day or 20 hours of instruction per week.
Small schools either have the teacher teach more than one subject, share teachers between schools, or have a part time teacher.
My kid’s school (K-5) has about 100 kids per grade. There are two PE teachers, two music teachers, and 1 art teacher. She has art once a week, PE 3 times a week, and music either once or twice. Her music teacher spends half her time at another school, but I think the other one is full time. I think the art and PE teachers are all full time. They may also do things like help supervise the playground and cafeteria to fill their days.
In my grade school, we only started art and PE (and music) in the 4th grade. Earlier grades just had recess and the occasional crafts done in class with our regular teacher. The art teacher was just a classmate’s mother who volunteered her time. The PE teacher was also the lunch administrator and custodian. The music teacher was the marching band leader for the junior high (and also a regular teacher, I think, for another subject at the junior high). Neither art, music nor PE were full time jobs. They were either added to other work, or just volunteered by a generous mom.
Similar to team coaches in high school, and other non-full time classes like driver’s ed or wood shop. These were mostly done by PE teachers, who rotated between teaching PE, driver’s ed, typing, “health” (which was part sex ed, part basic stuff like washing your hands and avoiding junk food) and then coaching sports for extra pay after school and on weekends. None of it was full time work, but they picked up enough gigs to cobble together a full time job at the school.
It is certainly not uncommon to have two small schools share an art or music teacher. I would also point out that while there is perhaps less grading for an art or music teacher, there’s a lot of material prep: art, especially, involves a lot of organizing different supplies, prepping them (like cutting out shapes, refilling paint pots, etc), putting them out, collecting them after, putting them away . . .
In my school district the instrumental music teachers teach at several schools. One of my kids had the same music teacher in elementary, middle and high school.
Don’t know about the art teachers, but I imagine there is no full-time faculty member who’s teaching less than a full-time load.
Yeah, I was mentally lumping that in as part of curriculum development. It’s not the same thing, but I really just meant prep work.
The more I’m reading this, the more I’m realizing how much Chronos’s response is on the mark: that my question refers to not only the level of education, but also to the size of the school. And I appreciate the specific examples people are providing; they’re helping me to understand how something like combining that job with another one works in practice!
But that is logistically how it’s done. In my previous district, one person taught music to grades K-5. Each grade (about 130-150 students in each) was divided into fifths. Two-ffiths of the grade went to PE, 1/5 to music, 1/5 to art. The next day, everyone rotates. There for, each individual student gets three days of PE, one day of music, and one day of art.
Incidentally, I looked up my own elementary school online, and discovered it’s doubled in size. So where there had been two third grade classrooms (for example), there are now five. So now for things like music and PE they have both a full-time teacher and a part-time teacher.
It’s neat to hear that some kids are getting PE three times a week now. When childhood obesity became a growing problem in society, I thought increasing the amount of PE in schools seemed like an obvious answer. I didn’t realize some districts have started teaching PE most days of the week.
And when poor academic performance became a growing problem, a lot of folks thought the obvious answer was to increase classroom time at the expense of things like PE. And in some schools, you’ll even see things like a dentist coming into the school, because that’s the only way a lot of the kids will get good dental care. There’s a limit to how many hours you can pack into a school day.
This is how it’s done in my kids’ elementary school that is about the same size as you mention. One added thing is each class is divided into fifths, so art, PE, music, computers, etc has kids from all classes of that grade.
I used to be a substitute teacher, and I was often called to sub for art, gym, and music teachers, especially the last. Clearly the principals thought it was necessary for teachers to have their planning time, or I wouldn’t have been called.
A friend has a daughter who is a certified special education teacher. It was easy for her to find a job, because she is also certified as a math teacher. She was hired by a small town school district, where she works with special education kids in both the elementary and the middle school, and is also the special education teacher for an even smaller nearby school district’s K-8 school. (She does a lot of driving in her jobs.)
Her workload varies depending on the number of special education kids in the various schools. I know that one year that was lower, so she also taught an advanced math class in the middle school.
(She is a full-time employee of the larger school district. Somehow, they ‘lease’ her services to the smaller district. Sometimes ‘bartered’ for other special teachers (art, PE, etc.))
Another thing to bear in mind is that music teachers are often responsible for holiday programs, and some elementary schools have choirs that practice after school.
And also bathroom time, frankly. My doc told me teachers often don’t drink enough fluids because they can’t run to the bathroom very often. I could sometimes dash to the loo between classes if I didn’t have students who needed me. Elementary teachers have no “between classes.”
I think it’s mostly been covered, but my elementary school was similar with two classes per grade. I think we had PE daily so our gym teacher was there for most of the day. Art and music teachers were only in once a week. There were four other elementary schools in the district so they rotated around. One of our two janitors also drove the school bus and they both were essentially facilities managers and handymen (installing dropped ceilings, fixing doors and windows, managing the boiler, plumbing, etc.). So they found ways to keep everyone busy. It can certainly be more cost effective to have a few teachers rotate between schools than to bus nearly every kid in the district to a single campus at the edge of town.
