[mike777]

"I really think that I would be a better teacher if I taught only three periods a day (instead of the five I now teach), plus I think that I would be a better person to be around, and more likely to not feel burned out, like I am afraid that I might feel in a few years, if I continue on like this."

This post really hit hard. If Elianna teaching 5 classes a day feels burned out and is thinking of leaving the profession this seems to be the key point. She feels that teaching only 3 periods a day would be much better for her and her students. She also points out she ends up putting in far more than 40 hours a week of work to teach 25 periods a week for a standard school schedule.

Reading her posts it sounds like the longer she is a teacher the longer the job takes rather than the shorter the time it takes to put in a good job. All of this seems very wrong and backwards. I mean with the time set aside for training days, holidays, vacations, etc she is still thinking about leaving and feeling burnt out. Something is very wrong here if teaching 25 hours of classroom is making teachers burn out and leave the profession.


Something is also very wrong if 18 out of 20 applicants are not qualified to teach at her school.
------------------------


CNN a few months ago did a series on Fenger HS on the south side of Chicago. This was the public HS where I grew up in Roseland/Pullman. The principle and many of the teachers seem to spend the vast majority of their time:
1) rounding up students to come to school so the school would get money.
2) trying but failing to make sure the students get to school without getting shot or beat up.

After all of this I am not sure the students or the teachers had much energy to actually try to teach and learn.

"When it opened in 1893, Fenger was known as Curtis School. It was renamed in 1915 in honor of Christian Fenger, a well-known surgeon. The current Fenger building was completed in 1926.[4]

On September 24, 2009, a Fenger honors student named Derrion Albert was beaten to death on his way home when he accidentally walked into the middle of a large brawl between teenagers from two neighborhoods. The video of the brawl gained international attention,[5] and President Barack Obama requested that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visit Chicago to meet with Fenger students and school officials.[6]

Fenger, along with its principal Elizabeth Dozier and numerous Fenger staff and students, was featured prominently in the 2014 CNN documentary series Chicagoland.[7]"

[mycroft]

Ed, I misread, I am sorry. My only excuse is that, as the son of a teacher, and growing up around teachers, the way I (and others) took your post *is* in fact, a constant attack on teachers: "they only work 9 months of the year, and only 9-3, and even then they get spares. And they expect to be paid *how much*? They should try a *real job* in the *real workforce*." They really believe that time not in front of students isn't really work time.

I apologize having read your post as yet another of those.

Having said that, the answer to your question is "you hire enough teachers that they do have class sizes of 25-30, you give them the accessibility and ESL support required to teach *all* of their students, and you give them enough time that isn't student-facing that they aren't working 80 hours a week. And you don't begrudge them their holidays (especially as they *have to* take them in high season, rather than the flexibility most of us "real workers" get to go to the tournaments we like or the nice places when they're cheap) to recover from the stresses of their job. And you pay them enough that going to get a real job, even though they hate it and really, really enjoy teaching, isn't an option too many of them will take." That's a lot of public workers, paid through taxes.

It means refocusing our priorities. It probably won't happen.

[mike777]

First off spending 80 hours a week to teach 25 hours of classroom first grade math or whatever subject is crazy! To do this week after week, month after month is NUTS! Something is very wrong!

My MOM was a teacher on the west side of Chicago. She seemed to spend a lot time on lesson plans and getting her kids hats and boots for winter. She seemed to not spend a lot of time teaching but dealing with the parents and higher ups. As for ESL, this was before the term was used but many of her students spoke Spanish and she spoke not a word but somehow got the job done.

I remember when I was a student at Pullman grammer school ESL meant the teacher telling me to take the Spanish kid to the cloak room and teach him. Later as an older adult and a grad student, I helped out with ESL kids as a Marketing TA. They had undergrads from around the world at that school in L.A.

As a kid I do remember urging her to try and cut a lot of what seemed like crap out of her day and focus and what was important. As an adult I always found my coworkers spending an awful lot of time on pure crap and then they complain about how many hours they had to work. I remember one time sitting with some higher ups and coworkers and the bosses wanted to know how long it took to do our job. They said more than 40-50 hours a week and they needed help. I said maybe ten hours and the rest was a waste of time.

One time my boss gave me a new guy to spend the day with me. I asked him to organize my files which I knew would take about 15 minutes, this guy spent 8 hours. I was transfixed watching him.


From some of these posts it sounds like teaching may have become working in a war zone, a non-English speaking war zone.

As for paying for all of this, in the USA schools are paid for out of property taxes. Chicago and LA may need to start raising taxes on properties(homes) to pay for their teachers and schools. Il, only spends $13,500 per student, per year.


Here is a state by state breakdown:
http://www.huffingto..._n_5484787.html

[blackshoe]

mycroft, on 2014-December-16, 15:34, said:

Ed, I misread, I am sorry. My only excuse is that, as the son of a teacher, and growing up around teachers, the way I (and others) took your post *is* in fact, a constant attack on teachers: "they only work 9 months of the year, and only 9-3, and even then they get spares. And they expect to be paid *how much*? They should try a *real job* in the *real workforce*." They really believe that time not in front of students isn't really work time.

I apologize having read your post as yet another of those.

Having said that, the answer to your question is "you hire enough teachers that they do have class sizes of 25-30, you give them the accessibility and ESL support required to teach *all* of their students, and you give them enough time that isn't student-facing that they aren't working 80 hours a week. And you don't begrudge them their holidays (especially as they *have to* take them in high season, rather than the flexibility most of us "real workers" get to go to the tournaments we like or the nice places when they're cheap) to recover from the stresses of their job. And you pay them enough that going to get a real job, even though they hate it and really, really enjoy teaching, isn't an option too many of them will take." That's a lot of public workers, paid through taxes.

It means refocusing our priorities. It probably won't happen.

Thank you. I was about ready to delete the damn post. I guess I'll let it stand.

I agree with your solution, and that it won't happen. I do think privatizing education may be a better way forward. I think "let the government take care of it" and raising taxes is the wrong way to do most things, including education.

For those of you who still think ill of me on this, I do understand and sympathize with the problems teachers have in this country.

[gwnn]

blackshoe, on 2014-December-15, 20:22, said:

Mycroft, you have completely misunderstood my post. Either that or you think this is a courtroom and your best strategy is attack.

How about explaining what your post means (in under 100 words, if you're short on time) before going straight to playing the victim? Then again, you never seem to be interested in explaining your points of view (for example, on gun control) beyond "shame on you for challenging me" so this is probably par for the course.

[mycroft]

And I think that privatizing education would be the worst possible thing you could do for it.

Well, except for the people that could afford the $30K/year/child a good education would cost - I guess they would be fine. Note that many of them already do this (and gripe about having to subsidize other people's kids even though they get nothing out of it themselves).

But I note the success of the private prison industry. "Capacity Guarantees" so the government ensures them a minimum income, and the guards are worse paid and harder worked (with inferior equipment) than in the state-run institutions - with the rest of it going to profit (and a few shareholders). I can't see any different outcome when the inmates are "other people's future criminals kids" rather than "other people's criminal relatives family".

I'm cynical, I guess. I'm also not really a believer in "I got mine, Jack; go get your own" - given that although I *do* got mine, there were many years where that attitude would have killed me (oh, and meant that society would have one less well-respected and very productive Software Architect and as well-respected as possible (under the circumstances) part-time Tournament Director producing and paying taxes).

[PassedOut]

mycroft, on 2014-December-17, 18:01, said:

And I think that privatizing education would be the worst possible thing you could do for it.

We have some history on how that works out here on the college level: Subprime Students: How For-Profit Universities Make a Killing By Exploiting College Dreams

Quote

Publicly traded schools have been shown to have profit margins, on average, of nearly 20%. A significant portion of these taxpayer-sourced proceeds are spent on Washington lobbyists to keep regulations weak and federal money pouring in. Meanwhile, these debt factories pay their chief executive officers $7.3 million in average yearly compensation. John Sperling, architect of the for-profit model and founder of the University of Phoenix, which serves more students than the entire University of California system or all the Ivy Leagues combined, died a billionaire in August.

Graduates of for-profit schools generally do not fare well. Indeed, they rarely find themselves in the kind of work they were promised when they enrolled, the kind of work that might enable them to repay their debts, let alone purchase the commodity-cornerstones of the American dream like a car or a home.

In the documentary "College Inc.," produced by PBS's investigative series Frontline, three young women recount how they enrolled in a nursing program at Everest College on the promise of $25-$35 an hour jobs on graduation. Course work, however, turned out to consist of visits to the Museum of Scientology to study "psychiatrics" and visits to a daycare center for their "pediatrics rotation." They each paid nearly $30,000 for a 12-month program, only to find themselves unemployable because they had been taught nearly nothing about their chosen field.

Good profits there, but it seems that education plays second fiddle.

[kenberg]

From what I have seen, it is very likely that the students did not pay $30,000. The school was paid $30,000 which is not the same thing at all. I have seen things along these lines, more than once, fairly close up. The students get loans. The loan money is used to pay the tuition. The students graduate, or maybe they graduate, and they have no way at all to pay the money back. The students are a pipeline for cassh from the government to the school. Not all of these for prifit schools are scams, and of course it depends on exactly what you consideer a scam, but in many cases the student, after the program, is a year or two older, not at all more employable, and has a debt that s/he will not be paying off.

This is not good.

[Elianna]

blackshoe, on 2014-December-16, 16:49, said:

I agree with your solution, and that it won't happen. I do think privatizing education may be a better way forward. I think "let the government take care of it" and raising taxes is the wrong way to do most things, including education.

I work at a charter school and I've worked at a private school. I can tell you that looking at my school and colleagues, the way to create a long-term sustainable workload for teachers is NOT through privatization. We have many international models of education that seem to work both in terms of student outcomes and for teachers. None of the ones I know of involve privatizing education.

Mike777 said:

Reading her posts it sounds like the longer she is a teacher the longer the job takes rather than the shorter the time it takes to put in a good job. All of this seems very wrong and backwards.

I will say that I seem to take on more and more each year. For example: Two years ago I taught Geometry from a curriculum that the school created, and created my own Precalculus curriculum. Last year, I changed a lot of the Precalculus curriculum, and took on Chemistry and Algebra 2. For Chemistry I relied on the main Chemistry teacher to set up labs/create plans, and I could concentrate on Precalculus and Algebra 2, both of which I taught in the past (even though I was changing some things about how I taught it).

This year, I am still teaching Precalculus, and pretty much sticking with what I did last year, with modifications (but not significant structural changes, so I can still use many of my lessons). I am, however, adding on two new courses that are new to me, and which no one else at my school teaches, so I am solely responsible for them.

I do have hopes that next year I will not teach a new class to me, but then I think that many students would benefit from having a Honors version of Precalculus, or AP Physics, and I know that I'm basically the only one at the school who can teach them, so...

Even if I don't teach anything new and never have to plan again, there will always be:
grading (I don't grade HW - so this is only tests, but I do allow students to retake tests - which is actually a school policy) - Maybe about 5 hours a week. Much longer when I assign reports.
Making copies for each class - about 3 hours a week.
Tutoring students in mandatory office hours - 3 hours a week.
Tutoring/counseling students outside of the mandatory office hours - 5 hours a week.
Meetings - 3 hours a week

Right now, I would say planning is probably around 10 hours a week, and I think that it would never get lower than 2 hours a week, because I would always look through them and see if there's something that can be improved on last year (and let's face it, there always is).

Typing this out, it looks like I spend 29 hours a week outside of teaching, which is 25 hours a week. So it seems that I have 54 hour work weeks.

Just typing this out makes it seem like a lot. No wonder I'm stressed out during the school year.

[mike777]

Elianna, on 2014-December-17, 21:57, said:

I work at a charter school and I've worked at a private school. I can tell you that looking at my school and colleagues, the way to create a long-term sustainable workload for teachers is NOT through privatization. We have many international models of education that seem to work both in terms of student outcomes and for teachers. None of the ones I know of involve privatizing education.


I will say that I seem to take on more and more each year. For example: Two years ago I taught Geometry from a curriculum that the school created, and created my own Precalculus curriculum. Last year, I changed a lot of the Precalculus curriculum, and took on Chemistry and Algebra 2. For Chemistry I relied on the main Chemistry teacher to set up labs/create plans, and I could concentrate on Precalculus and Algebra 2, both of which I taught in the past (even though I was changing some things about how I taught it).

This year, I am still teaching Precalculus, and pretty much sticking with what I did last year, with modifications (but not significant structural changes, so I can still use many of my lessons). I am, however, adding on two new courses that are new to me, and which no one else at my school teaches, so I am solely responsible for them.

I do have hopes that next year I will not teach a new class to me, but then I think that many students would benefit from having a Honors version of Precalculus, or AP Physics, and I know that I'm basically the only one at the school who can teach them, so...

Even if I don't teach anything new and never have to plan again, there will always be:
grading (I don't grade HW - so this is only tests, but I do allow students to retake tests - which is actually a school policy) - Maybe about 5 hours a week. Much longer when I assign reports.
Making copies for each class - about 3 hours a week.
Tutoring students in mandatory office hours - 3 hours a week.
Tutoring/counseling students outside of the mandatory office hours - 5 hours a week.
Meetings - 3 hours a week

Right now, I would say planning is probably around 10 hours a week, and I think that it would never get lower than 2 hours a week, because I would always look through them and see if there's something that can be improved on last year (and let's face it, there always is).

Typing this out, it looks like I spend 29 hours a week outside of teaching, which is 25 hours a week. So it seems that I have 54 hour work weeks.

Just typing this out makes it seem like a lot. No wonder I'm stressed out during the school year.

Ok thanks for your post. You are working 54 hours a week and getting stressed out and thinking of leaving the profession. It seems this model is NOT working. I don't know how to fix it or if anyone does but clearly based on this thread there are major problems.

I wanted to add that over the years I have often asked my coworkers and friends who say they are overworked how they spend their day. They never seem to have any idea how they spend their working day or week. You do!

Not sure how you can cut out 14-20 hours out of the above but clearly something here is wrong. Good luck and best wishes.

"I really think that I would be a better teacher if I taught only three periods a day (instead of the five I now teach), plus I think that I would be a better person to be around, and more likely to not feel burned out, like I am afraid that I might feel in a few years, if I continue on like this."

------------


edit side note
As a nonteacher what struck me were the ten hours of prep work and 3 hours of copy, and 3 hours of meetings, every week, every month, year after year. Not sure if any of that can be cut or delegated.

[barmar]

3 hours of copying? Are you still using ditto machines? How much stuff are you printing that isn't online, so you can just send it to the printer and say "Copies: 30".

[mycroft]

I am surprised more things aren't going on an internal wiki that gets accessed by the students, but I'm also sure I am missing stuff.

But that 3 hours includes copying, collating, and passing everything out. Plus security, if it's tests. I'd guess it takes 5-10 minutes to get all the stuff together and to the copier, 5 minutes to copy, 5-10 to collate (assuming the copier doesn't do that), 5 minutes back to the locked filing cabinet, and another 5 to get it and pass it out.

So, half an hour per thing copied. 5 classes, each with different things to copy on different schedules? I can see, even with efficiency foremost (which is trivial to do in such a high-interruption environment) this running to 3 hours without even noticing it.

[Elianna]

The problem is that many of my students don't have internet at home, so I can't put things online. Also, while we have a wifi network at school, we don't have enough devices for students, so again, I can't put internal class documents online.

And yes, it may take only a few minutes to start a print job, I have to stay by the printer in case of a jam (and in fact, that happens about every 500 pages or so, and that takes time to clear).

You're right - it's the collating/organizing/storing/setting up that takes up that 3 hours. and it's not 3 hours a DAY, it's 3 hours over five days, so that's 36 minutes a day, and I don't really see how to be more efficient than that. I do try to have a student do some of this for me after school (giving community service hours), but I can't have her do anything that involves tests/quizzes, and she doesn't know how to manage the machine to use colored paper. Plus if other teachers are trying to use the machine, they will just preempt her, so I end up doing this myself.

I usually end up having her sort exit tickets (which I did not put in my time above). She's much slower at this than I am, but at least it's her time and I don't have to supervise her.

[helene_t]

I have lots of teachers among my friends and relatives in Denmark. Although it is probably true that Danish teachers have something resembling a normal 1850h work year I also recognise what Elianna describes.

The amount of nonclassroom work has increased over the decades. More complex shedules - nowadays it is rare that two students have the same shedule or that anyone has the same shedule in two consecutive weeks - has increased and despite an increase in admin staff - my dad's school went from half a secretary to four secretaries during the three decades he worked there - it obviously also adds to the teacher's workload. More frequent changes to the curriculum is also a huge burden, more so for those teachers who have to write exercises and tests themselves.

Finally there is an increased expectation that teachers deal with the pupils' noneducatipnal issues such as crime and parental abuse.

[mike777]

My concern at least in the USA is all this added complexity over the decades and non classroom work is not improving the results compared to years ago. If poverty is down 10-50% from the 60's and spending after inflation is up the model sounds broken.

I presented the state by state breakdown in my previous post. Elianna is spending 54 hours a week to do 25 hours of classroom. Something is wrong.

[PassedOut]

From the Post today: Many parents hated Common Core math at first, before figuring it out

Quote

I asked readers to email me what they thought of the new methods derived from the standards.

Astonishingly, given the political controversy and my own ambivalence about Common Core, almost all of the reactions from people with children in schools have been positive, particularly when talking about math.

Nearly every one of them said they disliked the program at first but changed their minds when they realized that their kids, with good teaching, were learning more with greater enjoyment than they did at that age.

Jeb! should have one of his people link to this article.

[y66]

From the WaPo story cited by PassedOut:

Quote

Claus von Zastrow, a father at Ben W. Murch Elementary in the District who has worked in education policy, recalled the derision over new alternative approaches to math. There is, for instance, the “make a 10” method of doing 9+6=15. Students could just memorize that arithmetic fact, von Zastrow said. But making a 10 allows them to put the numbers together in a way that promotes number sense: 9+6=(9+1)+5=10+5=15.

“The make-a-10 method is in common use in high-performing countries,” he said, but Common Core critics “had a field day with it because it takes half an hour to explain and about 20 seconds to ridicule.”

My dad learned to do arithmetic that way 80 years ago. I never met anyone who could do arithmetic problems in their head faster than he could or who enjoyed doing them more.

[Zelandakh]

y66, on 2016-February-01, 07:41, said:

My dad learned to do arithmetic that way 80 years ago. I never met anyone who could do arithmetic problems in their head faster than he could or who enjoyed doing them more.

I always feel this technique is more useful for subtraction. The classic example is working out the age of someone born in the late 1900s. So 1977 for example, you make up to 2000 with 23 and then add the 15-16 years for 2016 giving an answer of 38 or 39. For addition I find simply adding the numbers together directly in groups with normaly carrying works better. It is sometimes useful for multiplication though (eg 9999 * 6). To be honest, I thought it was standard all over the world to learn the technique, just not necessarily to use it for problems such as the one given (9+6).

[kenberg]

I can't say that I remember learning ot add but I do remember learning to multiply. I had some trouble with 9 times 6=54 versus 8 times 7=56. But I could count by 6s or 7s, or by 8s or 9s, and I understood that 8 times 7 was the sum of 8 7s so I could check it.

Now I think that I have a point. Our task was to learn 9 times 6 and 8 times 7. A useful technique was to add in our heads until we could state the result from memory. Yes, we learned the connection between addition and multiplication along the way.

For the addition: I would like it better if students were required to learn that 9+6 = 15, and were helped, as a technique, to understand that 9+6=9+1+5=10+5=15. Presenting this technique as being the right way to add (if that is what is done) seems odd. Along the lines of what Zel says, I once would add 33+42+77 by first rearranging to get 33+77+42=110+42-152, but later i decided this was more trouble than it was worth.

If you ask me the age of my kids, right off I don't know. But the younger was born in 1967, the older in 1961, these numbers don't change every year, and I can work it out, usually just as Zel says. Eg 2000 minus 1961 is 39, add 15 not 16 since her birthday is in August, done.

Really what strikes me as odd is that parents have opinions on these matters. My mother saw to it that I was in bed at a reasonable hour, I was allowed to sing myself to sleep, I usually got up on my own, she gave me breakfast, i went to school. She no more would have told the teacher how to teach me arithmetic than she would have put up with the teacher telling her how to fix my breakfast. Actually by that time I was probably fixing my own, but you get the oint.


Anyway, I expect Common Core is fine. Most things stand or fall on how well they are executed.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2016-February-01, 11:19, said:

Really what strikes me as odd is that parents have opinions on these matters. My mother saw to it that I was in bed at a reasonable hour, I was allowed to sing myself to sleep, I usually got up on my own, she gave me breakfast, i went to school. She no more would have told the teacher how to teach me arithmetic than she would have put up with the teacher telling her how to fix my breakfast. Actually by that time I was probably fixing my own, but you get the oint.

I suspect some of this come from the idea "We learned it the old way, and we came out fine -- why change what isn't broken?".

Also, parents are often expected to help their kids with homework. If they don't understand the way the subject is being taught, they won't be able to help very well. Wasn't that a common complaint about "New Math" back in the 70's?

And these days, there probably are people (probably including teachers) weighing in on how parents should fix breakfast (and other parental duties). If they find out that a student isn't getting a good breakfast, they might contact the parents and recommend that they do a better job, as it's a prerequisite for learning well.