otoh

There have been a few very negative opinion columns in the local paper recently. I’ve started a more detailed response that I’ll post somewhere if I ever finish it, but since this is final exam week I thought I’d do a mini-rant here. Feel free to comment, but please don’t call us names like the local columnists did. (You all do know that I teach in a public high school, right?)

One of the issues is the amount of time that we spend in direct instruction. The state Board of Education requires a minimum number of minutes of instruction in a school year to get credit for a class. In my county we meet that requirement, but there are some neighboring counties that schedule a few minutes more than the minimum.

Our duty day is 7.5 hours. In the high schools we are usually scheduled to teach five periods with one period for planning and 25 minutes for lunch. The remaining time includes passing time between classes (during which we are required to supervise students in the hallways) and time before and after school (during which we frequently have parent conferences, faculty meetings, department meetings, training sessions, planning, grading, etc.).

So these geniuses (genii?) figure that if I teach five classes of about 50 minutes each, then I’m only “working” 250 minutes (or a little over 4 hours) per day. And if I object to a proposal that I teach another 50 minutes per day I must be a slacker or a “petulant brat.” They sometimes grudgingly admit that most good teachers really work far more than the 7.5 hours per day and five days per week that we get paid for. An informal survey of my colleagues indicates an average of about 9 hours per day is pretty common. (I’m usually on campus from around 6:15 am until about 3:30 or 4:00 pm — and I still do some work at home.) But since there are some bad teachers (and, yes, there are) in the system that are not as dedicated, it’s okay to treat all of us like slackers and call us names.

So if I have to teach another 50 minutes, that doesn’t mean I give up a coffee break (we don’t get coffee breaks) or that I spend less time with my feet up on the desk. It means that I either do even MORE work for free or I do less in planning, evaluation, preparation, parent conferences, meetings, and training.The columnists want me to act like a professional and work as many hours as it takes to get the job done while they treat me like an hourly worker in determining how much of that time I deserve to get paid for.

They hide their arguments in the need to improve test scores. I don’t disagree with the need to get all of our students reading on grade level, writing coherently, and performing mathematical computations correctly. But, trust me, the solution to that problem is far more complex than adding a few minutes to each class period.