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Comment by mmaro | Hacker News Reader

Teachers do not work less than 40 hours per week. A ton of time is spent on grading, prep, helping slow students, school meetings, complying with NCLB requirements, etc.

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According to the BLS, the average full time teacher works slightly less than 40 hours/week (see Table 2). This includes time at the workplace, at home and at another location.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Ah, right. I made a very stupid mistake in thinking they teach students for ~7 hours/day. I was also biased by my (probably) above-average experiences with teachers.

I looked at the chart for percent of teachers working on a given day (orange and gray one). The orange alone gives 9.5 hours per day. That alone is more than 40 hours per week.

Which chart? They are numbered, you know.

[edit: I'm guessing you are referring to chart 6, but that data is restricted to "days when they did at least some work".]

Number 6. Sorry, the color description was completely useless.

Edit: I'm tired, and I'm making a bunch of stupid mistakes. Figure 6 and figure 5 are directly at odds with each other. I can't account for the discrepancy, so I'm going to reduce the signal to noise ratio, and get rid of some of my other comments. I apologize to everyone for spamming stupidly.

Are these data averaged across the entire year (including summers)? The summary is not clear about that, although it does include data from summer interviews.

If it is averaged across summers, you can have a teacher working 50 hrs/wk during the school year, 0 hours during the summer and have the average come out to less than 40.

From the third paragraph of the article I linked to:

With the exception of chart 1, all estimates presented are restricted to persons who were employed during the week prior to their interview and who did some work during that period. Thus, a teacher who was on summer or semester break during the week of the survey is not included in this analysis.

A great way to answer questions about an article someone cites is to actually read it.

I had read the article and read that section, but it doesn't answer my question - all that says is that teachers on break weren't included in the study, that doesn't say whether or not the data taken from the teachers included in the study were averaged across a (working or school) year just across the interviewees.

But thank you for your respectful response.

In the ATUS, interviewers collect data in a time diary format, in which survey participants provide information about "yesterday."

So no, it's not averaged across a year (unless the teacher worked a full year).

While the typical office workers averages 40hrs a week in the office, how many hours are they really productive? If they had to record only the hours that they're productive at tasks, would it come close to 40hrs?

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