Some math for you

[danaeris]

For those of you who have always wondered, like I have, how the whole vacations, plus prep time thing balance out for teachers.


Normal jobs in Ontario:

40 hours/week - (1 hour lunch break/day + 2*15 minute breaks/day)*5 days = 32.5 hours/week of actual work
52 weeks - 8 mandatory holidays/5 days per week - 2 weeks vacation = 48.4 work weeks

So, working hours for a normal, full-time employed person in Ontario = 1573 hours/year

---

Now, from the interweb, there are 196.5 school days in a year, on average.

Legally, teachers are required to be at the school from 8-3, at the absolute minimum. That's 7 hours per day.

A friend of mine theoretically gets a 50 minute lunch break, and a 40 minute "nutrition" break, adding up to the 1.5 hour minimum break time that "normal" jobs get. But wait. Portions of those "breaks" are spent supervising children. This can average anywhere from 15 to 35 minutes per day depending on the school. The union is currently trying to get it capped at 24 minutes per day. Let's assume the union wins; then weekly break time is reduced to 5.5 hours/week, or 1.1 hours/day.

Ignoring prep time for the moment, this means the teachers are working 1159.35 hours per year.

At first glance, this is far less than what a normal full time employee makes, but we mustn't forget that we haven't yet accounted for prep time, a very important part of a teacher's day. If we assume that they should only have to devote enough time to prep time to work the same amount as a normal worker, we can do this by dividing the difference in yearly work hours by the number of school days.

413.65/196.5 = 2.1 hours prep time/day outside of school hours

Teachers also get a small amount of prep time during the school day. My friend who teaches gets an average of 30 minutes each day; over the next three years that's supposed to rise to about 40 minutes each day, putting prep time at about 2.8 hours.

Prep time is spent creating lesson plans, updating lesson plans, grading papers, talking to parents, designing tests, papers, and projects, helping students, rearranging and maintaining the classroom, etc. etc. You could also consider running after-school clubs, etc. as part of prep time.

Is that enough? Too much? Just right? I can't tell you. If you decide to argue your point, be nice, polite, etc.

Comments

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I would say your math works out almost exactly right. Most of the teachers I know and work with spend about two hours outside of school time on school work each day. Many spend more than that. I've known teachers who arrived at school an hour before the bell and stayed two or three hours after it, every day of the school year.

There's one thing you haven't considered, though. Report cards. These are done three times a year. One of those times, we have a P.A. day to work on them. I'm good with a computer and I plan with report cards in mind, so I can get them done, usually, in about ten hours of dedicated work per term.

Over three terms, that adds up to most of another work week. That's in addition to all the usual prep and marking that has to be done, because classes don't stop while teachers work on report cards. In a similar vein, many of the new assessment tools take a huge amount of teacher prep time, both to administer and to mark, then to correlate the information. Each round of DRA (there are two in a year) takes approximately five hours of my time. So, if you put the two DRA's and three report cards together and subtract the seven hours of the PA day, you get 33 hours. That's one extra work week.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Paid lunch breaks??? I've never worked somewhere where I got those. Wow. Canada is different.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I've had paid lunch breaks at every company I've worked at, including a non-union factory where I was a minimum wage line monkey.

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I've never had a paid unch break here in Canada. Every place I've worked has had a half hour unpaid lunch and two paid 15 min breaks.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's not required, but it's very common.

[rowan-syngwyn.livejournal.com]

As a teacher of 10 years, I can tell you that ON PAPER that is just about right.

BUT....

Take into account the following:

1) Most parents are NOT available when you as a teacher are available to talk, which means you give up a part of your private time at home to talk to them.

2) Most teachers will spend anywhere from 1 to 6 hours a week in their classroom looking after a child who has not been picked up by a parent or a guardian.

3) Most teachers will spend 1 - 6 hours a week in their classroom BEFORE SCHOOL looking out for a child whose parents dropped them off before the school day begins.

4) Most teachers will spend (on an average) of $300 - $1200 US dollars out of their own pocket paying for the classes that they need to remain certified to teach, and they will take those classes during their breaks and during their free time. Some teachers will happily pay triple that to keep their skills sharp.

5) Many teachers pay for child care as they educate other peoples' children.

6) The average teacher in the US gives up 1.5 hours of their personal time to meetings, etc. for every 3 hours they spend in the classroom.

AND 95% of the good teachers in the world will do all of these things without batting an eyelash because teaching is what they WANT TO BE DOING. :o)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You forgot the money we all spend on resources for the classroom that the school doesn't reimburse us for. I spent $300 on that this year, and not a penny of it will I see. This is because the schools can never seem to afford the textbooks they need, so teachers get to cobble something together from photocopiable resources and their own knowledge. This adds exponentially to the amount of prep time required for those classes, of course.

I would leave out the fact that we pay for childcare for our own kids - everyone else does that while they work, too. It's part of being in the workforce. (Yes, I have a child, and yes, I pay for babysitting.)

[rowan-syngwyn.livejournal.com]

May I be nosey and ask where you teach? Because in the state I teach in, all of the resources I purchase out of my own pocket for work is tax deductable.

And I appreciate that some people would NOT include child care in this litany, but I would for the following reason: every time my dept. chair is late picking up her child because someone else isn't on time, she is charged time and a half for her daughter. Last month, during the busiest part of the sports season, she shelled out an extra $1500 in childcare due to other peoples' schedules. I personally believe that something like this is another demonstration of just how far a good teacher will go to do their job correctly. :o)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I teach in Ontario, and my information was the basis for danaeris' math. I teach grade five. My professional fees and education are tax-deductible, though I don't get all of it back. Resources I purchase for the classroom are not.

I'm lucky, in that my childcare is mostly provided by my mother-in-law, who doesn't charge me extra when I'm late for some reason. Usually, my sister-in-law will take over for an hour or two if I'm at the school into the evening, and my daughter loves time with her aunt. On Tuesdays, however, she goes to daycare, and I have to be there to pick her up by five o'clock or I pay extra - I believe it's ten dollars for every half-hour I'm late. Since extra things at our school are generally scheduled for Thursdays, this has never been a problem.

Again, though, being late because of meetings at work can happen in any professional job. If we expect to be treated as professionals, there are some things we have to accept as a part of that, and childcare while we do our jobs, even unpaid overtime, is one of them.

That said, she should talk to her school district about offsetting those costs. $1500 is an awful lot of money.

[octal.livejournal.com]

Bad teachers are underpaid overpaid.

Good teachers are substantially underpaid.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'd love to know how you differentiate?

[octal.livejournal.com]

It is difficult or impossible to do in "realtime", but it should be possible to tell retrospectively over a 5-10 year period, based on performance of students.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The performance of students has so many variables attached to it, I can't see how you could realistically tie it into the effects of one teacher. It might be possible with the teachers at either end of the spectrum - extraordinarily bad or good - but for the bulk of them, who do a good job most of the time? How do you tell the difference between good parenting and good teaching? Or good teaching in one grade versus good teaching in the next? Or good teaching with good administrative support and school environment, versus equally good teaching in a less-supportive environment? This is a huge can of worms.

[octal.livejournal.com]

By analyzing enough students over a long enough period of time, it should be possible to determine with reasonable accuracy.

If a teacher is really great as a 12th grade science teacher, but horrible as a grade 1 english teacher, and he is acting as a grade 1 english teacher, it is his fault or the administration's fault for putting him in a position where he's doing a bad job -- plus it's a waste of his talent as a 12th grade science teacher. I assume most teachers and administrators can figure this out for themselves.

I'm not necessarily advocating performance-based pay; it's that some teachers are really good, and some are really bad. Clearly we need a larger number of excellent teachers (and to retain the excellent ones who are there now). Teaching doesn't really seem like the kind of career most people would go into for purely financial reasons, but rather something many would do because they genuinely enjoy teaching. So financial rewards probably aren't going to be as effective as they would be for e.g. salespeople or stock traders. Non-financial rewards which themselves have cost (such as smaller class sizes, admin support to do grading, better facilities, etc.) are often more effective.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In Ontario, teacher pay is determined in two ways that co-exist: the first is education, and the second is experience. Most teachers nowadays enter the profession at the third level of education; there are only four levels, so if they take four more university courses, they are at the highest pay level. Experience is measured purely by time. I'm entering my sixth year of teaching, and I'm at the third pay level. There's a little chart in my contract to tell me exactly how much I should make at that level.

I have been considering for a while the idea of adding a fifth level that would supercede all the others - a Master Teacher level. To reach this level, a teacher would need to be at the highest pay level in the other two; that is, the equivalent of a master's degree, and eleven years' experience. They would need to have excellent performance evaluations for the previous five years (allowing for a learning curve in the early years of their career.) They would need to be contributing something the profession as a whole - teaching a course, taking a student teacher, acting as a lead literacy or numeracy teacher in their school - something that involves extra responsibility for training other teachers, while still being classroom teachers themselves. This level should be something that needs to be maintained - within a given period of time, say three years, this teacher would need to do several things to support the profession and maintain their own exemplary classroom practice.

I do not support the idea of merit-based pay for a profession as a whole, because there are too many factors affecting both a teacher's performance and a student's. But the idea of recognizing the best teachers and supporting excellent practice in the classroom is long overdue.