Typical View
Let’s take a quick look at a typical teacher’s work week. I’ll use my own schedule as an example. The typical day starts at 7 pm and ends at 3 pm with ½ hour for lunch. Most teachers have five teaching class periods, one duty period, and one preparation period per day. In some schools, teachers have six teaching class periods.
The total required minutes per week at the school site are 7.5 hours x 5 days x 60 minutes = 2250 minutes. Wow, teachers sure have it easy. A typical 40 hour work week would be 40 hours x 60 minutes = 2400 minutes. This seems to prove that old adage “those who can do, those who can’t teach.”
I guess that’s why teachers’ pay is lower than that of most other college graduates as shown in the graph below.
How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/events/spring07/allegretto/HowDoesTeacherPayCompare.pdf
It is true that teachers often have some added benefits such as good health coverage and a pension. As a former chemical engineer of fifteen years who moved into teaching thirty plus years ago, I am sure that I would have made substantially more money if I had stayed in engineering. The difference would have been even greater if I had gotten a promotion during my engineering career. When I made the switch in careers, my salary dropped by about one half. And most teaching salaries are based on a salary scale that keeps their wages low for much of their career.
The Life Of A Teacher Chart
This is a graphic of most of the possible duties of a typical teacher. All teachers do not do all of these functions, but most of them do. The analysis above covered the functions shown in yellow. These are the most obvious and well known responsibilities of a teacher. But the chart is much like a shark, with most of the animal below the water.
Let’s take a look at many of these below the water functions, describe them in more detail, and get a better idea of the real time commitment of the typical teacher I will talk about my own experience as a science teacher, but from what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much the same for teachers in other curricular areas.
A Second Look At A Teacher’s Life
Grading homework, laboratories, quizzes, and tests
A typical teacher student load might be 24 students x 5 classes = 120 students.
It would not by unusual to have one laboratory and one quiz / test each week.
Grading labs is very time consuming, especially if you the student is sloppy and disorganized. It would be reasonable to say that each lab would take around 5 minutes to grade on average. During the grading of almost every lab, I must have written include units at least sixty times.
Quizzes usually have more multiple choice type questions, are shorter than tests, and easier to grade. They take around 1 minute each to grade.
Tests can also take time, especially if they have several complicated problems, and the teacher is giving partial credit. A reasonable grading time estimate would be 4 minutes to grade each test.
So, a quick estimate of the time for grading could be:
Labs: 120 students x 5 minutes = 600 minutes/week
Tests & Quizzes: 120 students x 2.5 minutes = 300 minutes/week
Entering grades and attendance
The new grading software has made it a lot easier to enter grades and keep attendance. These do have to be entered on a timely basis, however, and now teachers are required to post grades or provide students grades in an anonymous way. Also, students and parents must be notified at least on a quarterly basis if students are not performing adequately. Let’s just say a minimum of an hour a week or 60 minutes per week.
Parent & student contacts
Thankfully most parent and even many student communications can be handled
by e-mail rather than a phone call. It has gotten more and more difficult to reach people by phone, resulting in a fun game of phone tag. The difficulty with e-mail communications is confidentiality. E-mail records are kept virtually forever and anything you don’t want to say, don’t put in an e-mail. Again, it’s easy to spend an hour a week on various communications with parents and students or 60 minutes per week.
Meetings
Some meetings are regularly scheduled, like faculty and department meetings, and parent’s conference nights and days. Others pop up at any time, like IEP (individual education plan), student discipline, and administrative observation meetings. Since it is hard to calculate, we will estimate 30 minutes per week.
Paperwork
There is plenty of paper circulating through a teacher’s mailbox like IEP notices
and disciplinary slips returned from the administration. There is also outgoing
paperwork like monthly reports and required lesson plans. This is a good place
include making copies, filing master copies, and keeping track of the piles of
labs, tests, and quizzes. I’d be hard pressed not to add at least another 60
minutes per week.
Training & state requirements
Most states require teachers to keep abreast of the latest pedagogy and technology by attending workshops and taking courses. It’s hard to estimate the average time per week, but during the time a teacher is taking a course, it can be quite immersive. There is often travel, books to read, projects to prepare, and classroom observations to make. Again, I’ll throw in another 60 minutes per week. I’ll cut this in half since some of the school meetings qualify.
Recommendations
Some teachers write a lot of recommendations and others not as much. Teachers of 11th and 12th grades and teachers of higher level and AP courses get asked to write the most. A thoughtful recommendation can take quite a while, which includes looking up the details of the students grades in the course, talking with other teachers and administrators about the student’s extra-curricular activities, and placing the information into a number of school’s different applications. Some schools hire substitutes to give teachers with a lot of recommendations days off to complete them. Let’s throw in 30 minutes per week.
Minutes Per Week So Far
Let’s take a break and see where we stand on the real amount of time a teacher works each week. Here is a summary of the above estimates in minutes per week.
Classroom teaching 1610 min (2250 min x 5 classes / 7 periods)
Duty time 320 min (2250 min x 1 period / 7 periods)
Grading papers 900 min
Grading input 60 min
Parent & student contacts 60 min
Meetings 30 min
Paperwork 60 min
Training 30 min
Recommendations 30 min
Total 3040 minutes / week
This comes out to roughly 51 hours per week! But let’s step back for a moment. There is some extra free time hiding in these numbers. If a teacher is giving a test, they can be grading papers for at least part of that time. Some of the duties, like hall and study hall duty, allow time for other activities. Others, like cafeteria or outside duties do not. We must also keep in mind that this extra time is usually broken up into 5 or 10 minute chunks separated by time so productivity is low. But, let’s subtract 30 minutes per week for the testing period and 60 min x ½ x 5 = 150 minutes per week for the duties.
So the grand total so far is 3040 – 30 – 150 = 2860 minutes per week or around 48 hours per week.
Even More Lurking Under The Water
But check out the Life Of A Teacher chart again shown below. We’ve covered the items in yellow (the ones typically associated with teaching) and the less well known items that are colored in blue. There are still some huge items that have not been dealt with.
Curriculum Development
The function that is most often ignored, even by administrators, is curriculum development. People assume that teachers can simply use the materials that were developed by other teachers or those available with the textbook. WRONG. The materials from the book very seldom either covers enough of the material or are of high enough quality. Even teachers that have been teaching for many years are still building their curriculum inventory and trying to fix mistakes from materials already created. Creating and finding curricular materials is one of the biggest challenges in teaching. It takes time to sift through the book’s and other teacher’s materials and create lesson plans and a day by day string of connected lessons. Other teachers often have their lessons in their heads and their handouts may not be as clear to you as it is to them. There is also little time to collaborate and talk about the materials. See the teacher work time numbers above.
Creating curriculum is sort of like the black hole of teaching. As one teacher said, “there is always another worksheet to create.” In other words, go home and don’t worry about it. Especially for a new teacher, finding the tools and curriculum for a course feels like trying to plug a large hole with water gushing in.
So how can we estimate how much time is spent on curriculum development. The answer is not enough but as much as you can spare. Certainly the time is 2 hours per week minimum, or 120 minutes per week.
Consider that writing a new lab, including finding and buying the materials, creating the concept, testing the concept, and creating an answer key can take 10 – 20 hours of work. Just revising another person’s lab to take into account different materials or teaching in a different room can take hours.
Student counseling and tutoring
Many people see this as both one of the most important and also most rewarding aspects of the teaching profession. Many teachers spend a lot of time doing this but have to cut back in other areas, meaning that they either work very long hours or leave papers ungraded or lessons unplanned.
A quick example will put this in perspective. Let’s say a teacher had 120 students and spent just 1 minute with each one each week. That is 120 minutes per week or two hours more time per week.
Extracurricular Activities
There are many openings for teachers to help students after school by sponsoring clubs and sports teams. Many of these clubs meet multiple times per week for several hours at a time. Again the reward to both teacher and student are large but the time commitment is also large.
Life Of A Teacher – The Final Tally
Let’s add up the numbers again.
Classroom teaching 1610 min (2250 min x 5 classes / 7 periods)
Duty time 320 min (2250 min x 1 period / 7 periods)
Grading papers 900 min
Grading input 60 min
Parent & student contacts 60 min
Meetings 30 min
Paperwork 60 min
Training 30 min
Recommendations 30 min
Adjustment – 180 min
Curriculum 120 min
Student contact 120 min
Extracurricular 60 min
Total 3160 minutes / week
This is around 54 hours per week. And that is being pretty conservative with the numbers and probably not doing a great job. And you wonder why there is so much talk about teacher burnout.
Here is a quick summary of the numbers, shown below in bar chart form.
Final Comments
Not only are these numbers conservative, but there are other factors that can take a lot of time out of a teacher’s work day. One of the reasons I was hired to a very good school system was due to the fact I was certified in three different curricular areas. What I did not realize was that I could be assigned over 15 different courses at three different ability levels. And many years there were three or four different courses of preparations. Also, it is not unusual for a teacher to “float,” that is teach in several different rooms. You can imagine the time involved not only to run from room to room but to make sure that all of the materials, papers, and plans are ready to go.
A number of studies agree with the numbers I’ve estimated. For example:
Additionally, in spite of low salaries, most teachers report working much longer-than-average hours. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a nationwide average workweek of 40.8 hours, 98% of teachers report working more than that. Most educators work more than 50 hours, with a whopping 43% of teachers reporting a workweek longer than 60 hours.
As if 60-hour workweeks weren’t enough, we were shocked to learn that more than one-quarter of teachers reported having to work a second job in order to feel financially stable. That’s a lot of work time, if you ask us.
How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/events/spring07/allegretto/HowDoesTeacherPayCompare.pdf
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