That is a question that comes up often for a teacher. They want to know what we DO that we have to spend all this time unpaid doing things. It's an easy but long-winded question to answer. These are all the things required for the gradebook:
A minimum of 1 grade entered per week
A minimum of 3 assessments per quarter
Specific, meaningful feedback on every student's paper
Now you might think 1 grade per week, big whoop. Here's the thing: Students need to do math homework every night. Not much, just think about what they learned that day for 5 minutes or so. I give them one problem a night. Every Monday, they turn in homework with answers to five questions. These are thinking questions, which require complete sentences and showing work for their examples. About half my students turn in homework, so that is around 75 papers to grade. I would say it takes about an hour to grade all the homework. That's 45 seconds per page.
Students need to have more than 1 paper returned each week in order for them to know how they are doing in class. So in addition to grading the homework, I need to grade classwork too. The kids keep a notebook with their bellwork and classwork, so I grade the notebooks. There are around 150 notebooks to grade, one for each student, and that is pretty quick because it is graded on completion, not accuracy. However, when there are 150 of them, that's not quick. It takes at least 20 minutes per class, so that's an hour - about 24 seconds per notebook.
We have a quiz or test about once every 10 school days. These are the biggies. They take FOREVER to grade because multiple choice is OK for about half the questions, but the others need to be performance-based answers. This means reading what they wrote, checking their work, and providing specific, meaningful feedback. It takes about 30 minutes to grade each period's quizzes, times 5, so that's 2.5 hours - 60 seconds per quiz or test.
Then, after the grading is done, the grades need to be entered into the online gradebook so that parents and students can access their grades (required). This is quick but it adds up when you have over 150 students.
All together that is an average of about 4.5 hours a week, just grading and entering grades.That's not counting having to look up the periods and last names of the kids who are too clueless to realize they are probably not the only Jose or Maria I have in my 5 class periods. (They get dinged points for that. It's so freaking frustrating they can't bother to write out their last name and by 7th grade they haven't got in the habit of doing it.)
I mentioned in my last post that we have 1.5 hours per day to do things not related to actual teaching. That's 7.5 hours all together per week. Four of them are gone - just grading.
One day per week we are required to spend 50 minutes with our content area, planning. There goes that.
We are required to make 5 positive parent contacts per week. I do postcards because if I try to make phone calls, parents want to talk and talk. Every day, there are probably 2 students who display behavior sufficiently stupid enough to warrant a parent phone call. (Last week a student dug a hole in the wall probably 2 inches long , an inch wide, and a half inch deep. The student was in time out for answering a math question I had asked the class by calling out "Doo doo.") Parents call in or email every now and then to find out how their kid is doing or complain about my homework/classwork policies. Those have to be attended to within 24 hours, required by the principal. I would say about 30 minutes per week is spent on parent contact, and that's a lowball estimate.
That leaves 2 hours and 10 minutes to do everything else. We have to write the daily objective on the board every day, along with the vocabulary and language objective. We have to write the bellwork every day. (Bellwork is absolutely required.) We have to make copies. We have to do 5 days worth of lesson plans, and lesson planning alone takes at least 4 hours every week because the template we are required to use is ridiculously long and detailed. We have to find resources for the lessons because the textbooks are woefully inadequate and don't meet the state standards. We have to upload our lesson plans to the school website so they can be scrutinized or duplicated by whomever wishes to do so.We have to clean our classroom counters, desks, and sinks because all the custodians have to do is clean the floor and empty the trash. We have to get the supplies out for class, be it markers, scissors, protractors, or whatnot. We have to go through the textbooks and erase or white out all the penis drawings, gang tags, and curse words.At least once a week, one of the administrators wants to have a meeting for this or that. We have team meetings with parents whose kids are acting like idiots on a regular basis. There are a thousand other things that teachers need to do. 2 hours and 10 minutes? Yeah, right.
You might be asking, "But what about during class? Can't you get any of this done while the kids are working on their own? Why, when I was a kid, the teacher sat and drank coffee and read the newspaper while we slaving away doing our work." You need to understand this: Teaching is not like that anymore. If EVER an administrator comes in and we are sitting at our desk, we hear about it. We HAVE to be monitoring the kids every single minute of every class. I would be doing that anyway because I teach all the lowest kids, academically speaking. Their level of independence is about zero. At any given time, if I try to have them work on their own, there are about 5 hands in the air. (If you keep your hand up, you have an excuse for not doing any work. "Miss, I was waiting for you to help me!") When they take a test, teachers are expected to be walking around, monitoring. I am not kidding you. If someone walks in and sees you doing anything else, you WILL hear about it. They visit at least once a day, by the way.
I could be a shitty teacher and leave some of this out. But you tell me, what have I said above that isn't required but also isn't necessary in order for me to teach effectively?
Having unloaded that, here are the rest of the stats for this week:
Tuesday: 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. = 9.5 hours, 2.5 unpaid.
Wednesday: 6:45 a.m. - 5:15 p.m. = 10 hours, 3 hours unpaid. (2 paid hours spent in a stupid meeting with all the math teachers in the school, designing a unit for the district, which they proceeded to throw out yesterday, saying it was inadequate. We're only teachers, what the fuck do we know about what the kids need to learn?)
Thursday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (15 minute meeting before school about tutoring.)
Friday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (10 minute meeting before school about how they were throwing out the curriculum unit mentioned above. Great way to start the day.)
Today I need to do my lesson plans and grade homework and quizzes, so it will be about 6 hours but I will have to post on that next time.
Weekly total: 35 paid, 17.75 unpaid = 52.75 hours this week.
Running total: 84 paid, 35.25 unpaid. Keep in mind, this was the 2nd week of school. Teachers got it easy, right?
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