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Yes, the truth is if teachers worked their contractual hours schools would fall apart; and teachers will emphasize this point as protest!

The general idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Some examples, many of which only do "work-to-rule" on certain days, not even on all of the days. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/09/west-chicago-teacher... https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/01/26/oran... https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/04/unhappy-r... https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/tulsa-public... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...

Teachers should just work their contractual hours. Now that would be a protest!

Part of my wife's contract includes wording like 'any duties', so they can add as much arbitrary work as they want

"and other duties as assigned" is pretty common contractual verbiage nowadays it seems

google "work to rule"

I'm somewhat baffled as to why "work to rule" is considered a sort of strike or protest.

If two parties have already agreed that one will perform a certain amount of work and another will pay a certain amount of money, it is unreasonable for either side to demand more than what the other side agreed to.

A contract becomes meaningless if one side can arbitrarily adjust the terms.

The massive power imbalance between employer and employee is the main factor here and the driving motivation for labor unions.

So much more than that even, so many are teachers must feel compelled to do what they must for the sake of their students. I know it's incidental, but the extra effort I see my own kids' teachers putting in without financial incentive is incredible. Education is a business where a lot of "employees" probably aren't doing the calculations around their pay-per-hour but rather are focused on the accomplishing the things necessary for their students success.

Maybe that's a long winded way of saying that I suspect a lot of teachers are bleeding hearts and do not closely manager their time or monetary budgets closely.

It's not about one side arbitrarily adjusting the terms; it's about both sides realizing that they have a shared interest in keeping the organization running. It's just not feasible to write an employment contract that fully encompasses the work needing to get done.

If you are not sure in advance what you are going to want teachers to do, then this might just be an excuse to exploit them.

Ensuring that a class gets taught well isn't just a matter of standing up in front of them from 8 to 3; any teacher can tell you about the amount of random surprise work that needs to get done at a school. You can call that work exploitation if you want, but the bottom line is still that someone has to do it.

Again: you're asking a teacher to cover roles other than teaching.

That's not good for anyone.

Feasible for whom?

For anyone, which is why work to rule strikes are such a well-known concept. Nobody in any industry can do it.

It represents the dichotomy between contracted work and what it actually take to do the job.

Remove 'contracted' and it applies to any work, or any day job in general.

Including software. It is also one of those reasons why the 40 hour work week is mostly a myth.

I fully support the teachers doing this, but the response by employers is more likely to be to lower the workload than anything else.

The only effective (read: doesn't cost anything to execute) strategy employers have to calibrate how much workload can be achieved in a given time is to keep increasing the amount of work until people start quitting or jobs go undone, then scale back a little bit. There are other strategies that cost more to execute or require enlightened management; but they aren't the norm in my experience.

All a teacher can really do for a class is either 1:1 time with an individual or N:1 time with a group. All the details of exactly what gets done only obscures the fact that there is always going to be a good outcome for students if the teacher puts in another half-hour of unpaid work and that teachers shouldn't do that because it is unpaid.

My friend works as a full time teacher. Has 24 * 45min=16h of classes each week which is above the norm which is 20 * 45min. He spends 2-3 more hours each week on grading things in case they have exams that week and about 2-3 hours each week in case he needs to prepare some materials. Most exams are already prepared and so are lessons. He doesn't call up parents (lol wtf) and students don't really ask questions on the platform. He has 3 weeks of winter vacations, 2 months of summer vacation and a week of Easter vacation. He has engaging lessons and always comes home with a new story about some cool interaction he had with the kids. He's way happier than when he was working in the private sector. He's teaching STEM classes in a high school known for problematic kids. He says the biggest problem with teachers is that half of them aren't for this job. They don't know how to handle the complex teacher-student relationship and start getting bullied by the worst kids with no way out. He says a big part of some of his colleagues being broken down shells of humans is that and the fact that they never worked in the industry so they don't appreciate the perks of being a teacher

I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever developed their classroom and subject matter skills. spending hours a week being unproductive or marginally productive on grading, grade entry because they were scared to or refused to learn more productive ways of accomplishing the same tasks. I would watch teachers spend hours a week grading, calculating and manually inputting informal daily comprehension checkouts-- a mini pop quiz to get a check on daily comprehension of the learning objectives for that day. These made up 10% or LESS of the students grade, and while they were very important information for the teacher to know where there were deficiencies ahead of formal assessment, the act of manually grading and inputting the information represented 90% of their work in this area. it was a complete inverse of effort on the teachers part vs impact on the students grade. I used technology to make these nearly completely automated. My first year all we had were smart clickers so I was limited to multiple choice but by my last year students had chromebooks and if I took the 3 minutes to put together an online assessment ahead of time, I could make it anything i wanted and have it auto score. I then made a choice to not even count the daily assessments in the student grades because apart from a classroom discipline perspective, they did not serve the student learning nearly so much as they gave me immediate data to judge how well I had presented the material. I spent maybe a half hour a week on this and it freed me up to use my planning time to assess critical thinking assignments, adjust to near real time assessment data, and plan more interesting and dynamic lessons. I did leave education because while i was not laid off, my fourth year fell in 2009 and there was a chance of being laid off (my tenure would have begun the first work day of my fourth year) and the projected retirement pool was smaller (retirement accounts took a big hit that spring) than the number of cuts needed to achieve full staffing. I do not know If I would have had a job come august but its irrelevant. I went from teaching science, engineering and technology to working in science, engineering and technology, and while not adjusting for 190 work days vs 240 work days a year, I make about double what I would make on negotiated pay scale, but this is the exception that proves the rule-- my pay was bound to a rate lower than private sector because demand and compensation in my field was so much higher than other fields. I do miss teaching, but I don't miss how tunnel visioned and inflexible it could be. I do not think that dramatically increasing compensation will achieve any gains in student learning but I do think that dramatically increasing student to teacher ratios, introducing the modern knowledge worker workflow to the profession, differential compensation and programs to better engage parents and communities (look at how horribly the transition to common core math has gone-- a much better way to teach numeracy that was atrociously communicated and taught to communities, parents and even many teachers to the point of becoming a political issue) will all improve outcomes, and really the only metric that really matters at the end of the day is increasing student learning, everything else is ancillary to that.

It's weird right? In the same way that programmers seem to like to brag about working all weekend or till 10pm on some killer bug, teachers like to brag about grading papers all week.

Online school stuff isn't perfect (looking at you blackboard and friends), but they can sure take a lot of this drudgery away if you are willing to learn a platform.

Slave morality is a thing. In terms of “Learn a new platform to keep the drudgery away”, perhaps, but you could also spend all your time learning new platforms then look back and realize you have accomplished very little else. If human interaction is the unique and critical component of school based education, then maybe that aspect should be where teachers focus their efforts? Leave the digital disruption to Ed tech and get back to the basic human fundamentals of pedagogy.

Issue is that BLS data consistently shows teachers working 40 hours per week or less. For example: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf (PDF).

Anecdotes consistently run one way, while data consistently runs another.

> On average for all days of the week, teachers worked 18 fewer minutes per day, and did household activities—such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management—12 more minutes per day, than all other full-time professionals.

This analysis would be a lot more useful if broken down by demographic categories, such as gender, marital status, age, and number/ages of children.

The demographic profile of teachers is pretty different than e.g. accountants or lawyers or engineers.

It would also be useful to break this down by salary bracket.

Anecdotally, my mother, a career primary-school teacher, worked 60+ hours/week most weeks (while school was in session; her preparation/cleanup took also took a couple full-time weeks out of every summer vacation, but the rest of the summer vacation she could travel etc.) for several decades. Much harder than most of the much-better-compensated other white-collar professionals I know.

I’m also not sure if self-reported estimates on a survey are reliable measures of time spent. Again anecdotally, people’s self-descriptions of how hard working they are seems to depend substantially on personality / identity. It would be interesting to see some more direct measurements of time use.

That doesn't mean the annecdotes don't represent a significant problem, it may just not be one that is universal. It may be endemic to certain states or school districts.

Very few of the teachers that just go in at 7, leave at 3 and work to contract, spread around anecdotes about it.

And there's more of those around than you might think.

I used to work in fast food. I would gladly get paid less per hour for my current software development job than I was back then (as long as it was above making rent). It was a much more draining job and it's effects consumed every waking minute during work days and spending off-days just recovering.

That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. Getting stuck is a real fear.

Its relative, I have plenty of friend who work in restaurant, they wouldn't want to trade with my software job. True that software development job is physically lot less demanding but for them its mentally exhausting.

It's not really relative. It's very varying depending on your tasks, location and environment and kind of restaurant.

We were at a very stressful location and working at another location could be a huge relief because of lower load. I would imagine the work environment would have to go to absolute trash for the dev job to come close.

If you say restaurant, it feel like it's not fast food, and the average differences in wages, hours, stress level and customer appreciation between establishments called restaurants vs fast food places is probably quite significant.

I find software development both emotionally and mentally exhausting. And frankly, quite boring most of the time. I would love to be able to make the same money slinging pizza like I did back in college. The job was trivial enough in complexity that it freed my mind to think about and do other interesting things.

I knew one software development manager who gave it all up and became a plumber. Another became a high school mathematics teacher.

I've been running an excavator recently to do some...yard work...and honestly that line of work seems pretty appealing, and quite lucrative.

I agree about fast food work being draining. Even on the hardest day, I've never left my software engineering job at the end of the day feeling half as exhausted as I did at my high school fast food jobs. From standing for 8 hours a day to the incessant churn of customers to the insults, condescension, and unreasonable demands that some of those customers would make, it is a demoralizing position.

If salary was determined based on the emotional and physical toll a job takes, I feel like a fast food worker would make more than I do as a software engineer.

I've never worked in an actual restaurant, but I did give up programming for a couple of years recently and after a while got a job delivering pizzas (in my car).

It was pure bliss. Most of my time was spent relaxing in my own car with my own music, or socializing with other employees in the pizza shop. Some (very few) customers were dicks, but who gives a fuck? All I do is deliver it, I was neither expected nor in any way able to help them with anything else. There is no concept of "oh, here's a bunch of work I didn't expect to have to do today." Show up, drive around, ???, profit, leave.

Since then I've accidentally stumbled back into software development and while it certainly has its upsides, I am infinitely more stressed. I miss the pizza gig almost daily.

I've never known a decent teacher that puts in less than fifty hours per week, and a typical week is more demanding than all but the most stressful weeks I've worked in software.

I've always wanted to be a teacher, still do. But their job is like 10x harder than mine and pays 1/10th the price, so as much as I'd enjoy it and I think I'd be good at it, it just seems insane.

Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.

I think the difficulty of the job is relative to your talent set.

My favorite teacher was my AP calc teacher in high school. She only graded during her planning session, never worked overtime, let us not only fix a broken classroom computer that the school basically abandoned but we also take turns playing GTA on it during lectures. Almost everyone in the class passed the AP exam. She was in MENSA and left a lucrative career fixing math for defense contractors because she just wanted to teach. There just aren't enough people with those kinds of chops to go around, regardless of the salary we are willing to pay.

How much preparations and grading there is depends on the subject (among other things). And mathematics is where you get most for free for just being smart and knowing your subject.

In (good) mathematics lessons, very little of the time is spent explaining the theory. Instead a lot time is spent doing exercises – both the teacher demonstrating and the students trying it out them selves. At that point the teaching becomes reactive, as the student get stuck and you help them figure it out. This requires little prep (basically finding good exercises).

In other subjects there is much more story telling and explaining. And it requires much more preparations in order to make it interesting, and keeping all kinds of details fresh in your mind.

As for grading, grading mathematics is quick and mechanical. While correcting an essay is a lot more draining.

So, I do not think talent is actually what is deciding factor here. The way you phrase it, it sounds to me like "Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".

Grading a multiplication test in grade school might be quick and mechanical but grading trig and calculus is not.

>"Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".

I'm 100% saying exactly that. This is true of basically every profession. Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.

> Grading a multiplication test in grade school might be quick and mechanical but grading trig and calculus is not.

I gravely disagree. I spent a lot of time grading calculus exams at universities, and it is a quick and fairly mechanical procedure. A group of five can churn through three hundred final exams in a working day.

Answers in maths are quite uniform and contain a few sentences which can be quickly judged by how correct they are. Calculus and trigonometry might be difficult for the students, but for someone who has taught it a few years, it is absolutely straight forward to recognise correct solutions.

Grading say, English short stories or essays is a completely different thing. There are a lot more sentences, which have to be analysed grammatically and semantically. You have to judge how coherent the student is, which is a non-local property. Does the end match the beginning? What is the student trying to say? Do they use a clear language? If not, what feed-back can you give that will improve it. What literary effects does the student command? Allusions? Irony? Foreshadowing? Contrast?

The answers are highly personal and even using rubric grading every one is a non-trivial judgement call.

I believe that the nature of the tasks and subjects have a bigger impact on how much time it takes to grade it, than how efficient the individual grader is. I have experience correcting in groups where I have been able to compare grading speed. Yes there are differences between how fast people grade, but they are minor, and often speed is inversely correlated with quality (of feedback given to the student).

> Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.

Learning takes time. Students learn by doing different activities related to the topic. Sometimes listening to the teacher explaining, sometimes working on problems of their own. In mathematics, it is easy to find good examples to demonstrate and problems for the students to work with. Other subjects, it is much more difficult, and requires prep work.

Taking less time to prepare will usually mean worse teaching. For instance I had a history teacher who would just put on recordings from History Channel. He thus had to spend little time preparing the lessons. But the learning outcome was not the best.

I think it's hyperbolic to claim teachers don't make 'livable' wages. In the U.S. median teacher salary is north of $60k [0]. Maybe there's an argument that this is too low to be fair but when the median U.S. wage is below $32k/yr it's hard to make the case it's not livable

Sometimes HN takes too much of a SV-centric view, especially in terms of wages.

[0] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/25-2031.00

Okay, but starting teacher salaries in CA are in the low $40s. Try living in SF or LA on that. I know my friend was teaching for 8 years and got a job in LA for $80k, but she left to go to Vegas because they pay a lot better there ~$100k, plus no state tax, plus it's way cheaper.

So, yes, maybe median is not bad. But starting out -- especially in a city -- seems really bad.

Especially when you factor in almost all of these teachers have college debt of about $30k+ to pay off...

The article touched on that point, though. It spoke about how the narrative is skewed because many teachers are in rural locations.

That same link shows that the median teacher salary in California is $82k, which is still 17% above the median household income in California [1]. The average student loan debt is right around $30k [2], so above average wages combined with average student loan debt shouldn't be construed as unlivable, unless that term is extended way beyond the plight of teachers (which may still be fair).

Again, it should be taken in context (outside the SV bubble). I know engineers who started at <$40k (albeit a few years back during the recession)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-economic-we...

You can always do what the teachers with connections do, and simply teach at private/charter schools.

Not sure where you're from, but I can at least confirm that in the Netherlands, we're really bad at estimating the amount of time teachers work - erring towards underestimating it.

There are some additional reasons for this. The first is that there's not a 1-on-1 correlation between number of classes to teach and hours of work. It is assumed that teachers spend, IIRC, 30 minutes before a lesson to prepare it. The time it requires in practice, though, strongly depends on your schedule: if you have to teach five different levels of students, that means you're preparing five different lessons. If you teach five different classes, but all of them at the same level, you'll be able to spread the preparation time over all five of them, greatly lowering the average time spent.

The other complicating factor is that there are seasons: summer holiday is relatively calm (you'll have nothing to do for most of the time), whereas exam weeks can be enormously stressful. So while on average a teacher might be working close to a regular, full-time job, it's practically impossible to maintain a 1fte job, since there will regularly be weeks in which the work is simply too overwhelming.

Edit: And one additional point: teachers are really bad at negotiating. They can demand higher wages or fewer working hours, but once push comes to shove, most of them will simply put up with it for fear of harming the students.

you forgot 9 weeks off every summer, paid holidays, no contributions into social security, and some get classroom aids, they don't design curriculum (it's purchased), throw in common core for good measure....

>9 weeks off every summer Unpaid. Also depending on location, it's more like 5 weeks >paid holidays No more than required by law >no contributions into social security Must be dependent on location. Here in Maine, my mother contributes to social security but is not eligible for benefits from it unless she retires after 30-35 years of teaching. >and some get classroom aids That's a laugh, teachers don't even get sufficient budget to buy school supplies for their classroom. >they don't design curriculum (it's purchased) Untrue. Maybe dependent on location, but once again, here in Maine, teachers are responsible for designing, building, and running their own curriculum, on a per-subject basis. >throw in common core for good measure Not sure what you mean by that

The vast majority of info about teaching as a career will vastly differ based on location. For example, it is my understanding that teaching in California is closer to a $60k salary, while here in Maine, the majority of schools are more like $40k after 20 years accrued. You get about 3 personal days a year, with just a bit more sick time, meaning teachers often have to just work sick. Teachers are also required to keep their education up with taking college level classes every few years, as well as meeting other requirements (which is a good thing) often out of their own pocket (which is bad thing). You start work not after 7:45, and are "done" by 4, unless you actually do your job as a teacher and want to not be fired, in which case you are done after 7pm. You teach hundreds of students, and often end up being the sole support figure for tens of students per year, basically adopting them and trying to contribute as much as you can to their lives. Everything you do, inside and outside of work, is scrutinized by the entire town. Every little twerp of a kid is an angel to their parents, and 80% of the parents will blame you for any problem they create. Imagine the kind of hate that the lowest retail worker gets, now imagine you went to college for 6ish years and still get that hate.

The single upside (again, here in Maine) is really really good, 100% employer paid healthcare, though no dental. Pretty much the only reason my dirt poor family didn't die on the street.

If school teachers worked how much they are paid, America would have collapsed 50 years ago.

What does common core have to do with how they get compensated?

n=2 now. My wife works a 1.0 FTE that the district rates as 1.6 to 1.8 FTE (seven classes per day). She works 50h / week at the absolute minimum.

Averaged across the entire year, or only during the school year?

I know a retired couple, my grandparents' best friends, who were both high school teachers. They traveled every year and somehow managed to keep from burning out. If teachers had to work the entire year, the burn-out rate would be 99%/year.

What would happen if your girlfriend worked her contracted hours only? Specifically, would there be a negative impact on student outcomes?

A school where almost all the teachers are working part time sounds unusual to me, and I wonder if that contributes to what sounds like an unpleasant environment. Most schools are staffed by full time employees with nowhere near the burnout rate you stated would occur here.

> my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job...

The thing is, many people in 40-hour-week jobs are doing upwards of 60 hours per week. I'd offer that the better paid the job and the more responsibility the job has, the more hours per week are required. Nearly everybody is doing their equivalent of grading papers and doing lesson plans.

> I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she's at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she's grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop & phone) etc etc.

Why does she accept this? You get a salary, you have hours to do shit then go home and forget about work. You need to prepare things? Do it at school during work hours. Stop gifting unpaid time to a corporation which does not care.

A few reasons. One, it's not a corporation, virtually every single school in the country is a public school. She's essentially a gov employee. Teachers have been striking and protesting against low wages for years, gov doesn't budge.

If you studied to become a teacher for half a decade, love your job, see the impact on kids who need you, and essentially work at a non-profit, there's very little recourse but leave teaching behind entirely and do something else in the private sector.

You can cut corners and stick to contracted hours but your classes will suck, your kids will know you don't care and won't care either. Both your job becomes boring, soulless, without impact or connection as the relationship with your students goes down the drain. You'll burn out for different reasons.

I'm exaggerating some points slightly but that's the gist of it.

Netherlands btw.

Maybe because the gift is to the students, not a "corporation". They're the ones being harmed if their teacher cuts hours worked.

Is that fair? No, but it's the moral calculus regardless. And it's at least one reason why teachers are, indeed, "underpaid".

She shouldn't accept it, but generally teachers aren't just working for a company and serving a customer. - They are responsible for the future of the kids they are teaching, and most of them are taking that responsibility very seriously.

Wait a second, are American teachers only paid for the hours they are spending in the classroom? Here in Germany, 20 hours is what you spent teaching, but it is a full-time job, as it is expected that you spent at least an hour preparing for every class.

They're generally salaried so they're paid a fixed amount no matter how much they work, with that amount normally negotiated by their union.

All data indicates that teachers are working less than 40 hours a week on average, which makes me believe that the ones putting in 50+ hours are a vocal, tiny minority.

I think it depends on the grade and/or subject you're teaching. My wife has taught HS English for a decade and the 45-50+ hr weeks has been the norm for her and her colleagues.

I have the impression (from my wife and her coworkers) that it's much easier for elementary and middle school teachers to work the contracted hours and not bring their work home with them.

High school just comes with a lot of extra baggage too.

I can see high school English being more time consuming than average, and certainly more than elementary school.

I've never understood why subjects and student age aren't considered in teacher pay scales across the board. My experience is limited, but I've never seen an instance where anything other than time and credentials (generally degrees) were considered.

Do you think that the non-work hours and other non-financial incentives (perks vs bricks) get used to vary the incentives for different types of teachers?

"Union contracts generally mandate that gym teachers must be paid the same as calculus teachers, with the predictable result of surpluses of gym teachers and shortages of calculus teachers."

Middle school (5-8) is where the work for students (and therefore teachers by necessity) starts to pile on

Manually grading papers takes so much time (my experience as a TA in graduate school) I definitely thought about ways to reduce the workload with machines .

Even 20% workload in grading papers (e.g., quantitative works are graded electronically) would mean so much for the entire teaching industry.

I hardly think you can refute an in-depth analysis that comes at the issues from many different angles based on a single line.

They do compare how many hours teachers work to other workers and also analyze the issue along multiple other lines that have nothing to do with hourly wage.