To be fair, no teacher I have ever known has stopped working at 3:20 PM. Grading and planning often go far into the evening.
I took it to heart. It worked very, very well for me in college. I'd always have homework with me ready to go and when I was waiting for a class to start, or any other short time with nothing to do, I'd do homework. I'd only get a bit done at a time but it really added up and reduced my take home workload considerably.
But you know how spine-jarring school busses are. Maybe if I'd been able to complete it on a laptop instead of worksheets.
But nah, with how I was treated by folks on my bus, my laptop would've been tossed out the window the second day.
I was lucky enough to always live very close to my schools, so hours spent commuting to school is entirely alien to me, and barring safety issues, I'm not sure a directed extracurricular learning program wouldn't be more beneficial (and if the student or parents care enough to commute, I imagine they could work out some program from available sources). Then again, I've never been put in a situation that young where it relied that much on my own motivation.
The primary reasons the school-bus commute was long was a) meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop and b) a 20 mile trek on the highway at 45mph.
If I had been able to drive (or carpooled), my commute would have been less than 35 minutes.
I guess that makes sense. It's not just "better" in the sense of different schools in an area may be better or worse, but also highly directed in certain areas. I can see the draw of that.
> meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop
Yes, come to think of it, people that rode the bus at my school probably had at least a 40-45 minute ride in the earlier stops just from this. I think I rode the bus once when going to a friend's house after school, so this didn't come to mind. The rest of the time I always walked (High School was literally across the street from my house, Middle School was a 20 minute brisk walk). Like I said, alien.
Thanks for your explanation. :)
(source: three parents/step-parents were school teachers)
They have over 20 days of holidays built in during the school year and a legitimate two months off between years.
The mere fact that many do take summer jobs is proof of that, IMO.
Or it's a proof that they need the money.
Teachers actually need to cram a lot in that time. All the preparation for next year, all self-education they need to do to stay up-to-date, select reading and learning materials. Planning the curriculum etc. The equivalent to all that work that freelancers factor into their daily rate and all the work that employees often do on the job ("I'll need to read the documentation so I know how to properly do that", "I'll google it", ...).
The fact that they still take on summer jobs on top of that can serve as an indicator that they actually don't have too much to do in that time or it can serve as an indicator that they need the money more than their time off.
My comment was based on observations of my SO, who is a high school biology teacher. She legitimately does not have to work at all for the great majority of the summer if she doesn't want to. I understand this may vary a lot by school district and location, and of course even if you don't have to work over the summer there are still benefits to doing so.
It's a great way to shuffle cost from one government budget (education) to another one (unemployment benefits), and also a convenient way to get rid of annoying parts of the staff.
Source: a friend who taught elementary school in the Boston area.
Where I went to school, teachers with less than five years of tenure essentially had to sponsor at least one extracurricular activity, just to earn enough extra pay to live on.
And then they still have to do grading and planning when the kids aren't there. That can be done away from the school building, but it still counts as work.