Teacher hours

Teachers are required to do, among other things, class time, class prep, staff meetings, extracurricular time, grading and continuing education (that they pay for themselves). The hours add up. As I said before it averages out to about 44 hours a week.

Now, my particular field is notorious for taking advantage of the people who work in it, so a 44 hour week seems quaint to me. A union might have helped. But in a sane world, where people supposedly work an 8 hour day 5 days a week, teachers work the equivalent of 5½ days a week. Except they cram most of that into 9 ½ months.

I know teachers. For them the school year starts in the end of August and lasts until July. In the next 6 weeks or so they get a vacation – that is, when they aren’t in class themselves. And when they aren’t they’re usually busy helping students, spending their own money and dedicating their time to do so much more than what gets done in their own classrooms. Teaching is not a job for the weak.

And every year they get blamed for the budgets they don’t control and the quality of the schools someone else is in charge of and the problems caused by environment and poverty and malnutrition and other problems at home. Their budgets are cut, their jobs are threatened and the solutions that are offered usually include hiring consultants or new district superintendents who get paid 3 to 4 times what the teachers earn. Their recommendations are to lay off teachers, cut back on school repairs and blame the teachers for the problems.

There are people on TV these days ridiculing teachers. People who work a few hours a day and make more in a week than a teacher earns in a month, or who make more in a year than a teacher will make in a lifetime – these people are calling teachers greedy elites who don’t work as hard as people on Wall Street.

I don’t know if it’s just fun to attack people who you don’t know and who can’t fight back or if it makes them feel good about themselves. That would be an unkind thought. Maybe these people believe what they say and are just talking about something they know nothing about. Maybe they think they are well-informed. Maybe they think what they say is true.

Maybe they should learn more and help their audiences understand things better.