When many people think of teaching, they may think of long summer holidays/vacations and short 6-hour workdays, but this is far from reality. When a parent thinks of their child’s teacher, they likely think about the 9 am-3 pm aspect of the day that that primary teacher spends in the classroom with the students ‘teaching’ or the high school teachers who spend an hour with their various classes throughout the day. But, if that is the case, when does the actual ‘work’ happen? When do the teachers plan for their lessons? When do they prepare resources and make photocopies? When do they post all those materials onto the LMS (learning management system, e.g. Google Classroom)? When do they decorate the classroom? When do they think about how to best communicate with their students? When do they collaborate with colleagues? When do they create, mark and provide feedback on assessments?
Teachers are so pressed for time, that most would admit that their lessons every day aren’t perfect. If you’re not in education, how long do you think it would take you to plan 6 hours of learning experiences for a group of 25-30 children? I spend about 2 hours preparing for every hour of a lecture I give, at least the first time I give it. Now, with time and experience, sometimes you only have to update what you’ve done previously, but now consider that you have some children with different learning needs and others who have already mastered what you’re going to tell them. What’s your best guess? 2 hours, 3? 4? Most teachers are required to be at work approximately a half-hour before the start of the school day; say 830 if school starts at 9, which sometimes includes morning supervision. And they are usually expected to be at school until around 330, or half-hour after the school day ends. So, 830-330 or 7 hours. Often, during that day they have to supervise lunch and/or recess and, especially in the earlier years, can’t just leave their classrooms to take bathroom breaks. We are talking about 7 hours of WORK! Now if we add the 2-3 hours it might take to plan a 6-hour teaching day, we are up to 9-10hrs per day, every day and that is often without proper breaks throughout the day. This doesn’t include the parent-teacher conferences, the excursions, the parent meetings, phone calls, extra time for behaviour difficulties, loading resources on Google classroom and everything else that goes into a teacher’s day. And they do all this for a starting salary of approximately $70,000/yr, which tops out approximately eight years later at $108,000/yr.
This post is not about how much teachers earn, nor is it a manifesto that teachers should be paid more, although I think they should be (based on some measure of performance), but rather about the expectations of and on teachers and how and when that work takes place. I hope this post, for the prospective and hopeful teachers, sheds light on the work that teachers do and the reason that so many don’t last in a profession that has been said to “eat its young” (Halford, 1998). In no other profession that I know of are neophytes expected to perform the same duties as their colleagues with much more experience. I remember my first day teaching in Australia and it was daunting. Yes, I had taught a little in the US and had done my professional experience placements here in Sydney, but now I was walking into a school, in a new country, with little understanding of the culture and norms of the school or schooling in general. While my story might be a little unique because I didn’t grow up in Australia, it is not very different to many stories of teachers’ first experience teaching. Many teachers end up in schools that are not familiar to them. Whether it be a different demographic, a different area, a bigger school, a smaller school, a regional and/or remote school or a city school, and a school population that has a high population of students from another culture or with English as an additional language or dialect – when teachers enter a school for the first time, especially at the beginning of their careers, it is trial by fire!
New teachers are given their classes, with no collegial support, at least not while teaching, to fend for themselves alone in a classroom for 6 hours a day with their students. In the case of primary school students, it is the same 25-30 students everyday, whereas in the case of the high school teacher, it is approximately 6 classes per day with 25-30 students in each – that’s 150-180 students per day! The stories of violence, both physical and verbal, towards teachers is strikingly common. According to the Conversation, in 2019, more than 40% of principals, yes principals, were victims of physical violence from students. In Queensland, in 2019, Workcover accepted 291 assault and occupational violence claims from teachers, which equates to 1.5 every school day in 2019 and it is believed that the number would be much higher, but many cases go unreported. The problem is so serious that in December 2020, AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) released its National Strategy to address teacher, school leader and other staff abuse. But I digress, this post isn’t about teacher abuse either, but it does help contextualise the environments teachers work in.
What I hope to communicate throughout this series is that being a teacher is hard work. I think that some parents may have gotten a sense of the difficult work of teachers during their brief (although I’m sure it didn’t seem brief at the time) stint of home-schooling over the past two years. As a parent, teacher and teacher educator, I hope we’ve seen the end of compulsory home-schooling, but I also hope that as a society we have a greater appreciation for what teachers do every day. For the prospective and future teachers out there, I hope these posts convey a more realistic view of what can be a very rewarding profession, if you can get past the long hours, hard work and never-ending demands of the job. To be an effective teacher it takes an boundless amount of patience, goodwill and a work ethic that many don’t realise is required. There are no short days and the work never ends. Every lesson could be better if you had more time, more resources, more engaged students etc. The holidays are better than any other job that I know of – somewhere between 12-16 weeks a year depending on the school and system you work for (it seems that the more you pay for school in Australia, the less your child has to go but. I’ll talk more about that next post), but those holidays are a much-needed respite from the long days and demands of a job that is both incredibly rewarding and exceedingly frustrating.
So, returning to the work of a teacher – it takes grit, determination, and most importantly and something that will have an entire post dedicated to it, Care! Teaching is not high-paying; it does not, contrary to popular belief, have short working days; it is frustrating; it requires a high level of skill, knowledge and belief in the desired outcome. If you are thinking of becoming a teacher; if you are currently training to become a teacher; if you are currently a teacher and looking for meaning in what you do – you have to work hard and continue to work hard every day. It doesn’t get easier each year, because the students are different and the world is different and we need to prepare the students for the world in which they live and the world in which they will live. This takes care and work – care first and then work to make your care matter. In the end, it is a profession that is over-regulated, under-paid, over-worked and often a political football with ever-changing rules, responsibilities and demands on the workforce. Is there any wonder we are currently experiencing a shortfall in the teacher workforce?
Maximising Student Potential 