She Has collapsed before when total was getting above 80 for several weeks.
They want to promote her to VP. They work even more hours then she does.
I make more then triple what she does.
This part doesn't make sense to me, can you please explain (I'm genuinely asking). My children are in elementary school, and the day is from 8:45-2:30. I can understand being there at 8am(i definitely have seen teachers showing up later than this though), and when I've driven by the school at 3pm nearly all the cars are gone from the teachers lot (if not all). I can understand that there's a lot of work outside of school, but I don't understand how you could ever get to 60 hours at school.
My dad was up at 6 and at school for 7am. Worked 7am-3pm (8 hours). He did marking for an hour or two most evenings, and a solid chunk on the weekends. Probably 50 hour weeks. And that's after 20 years of teaching the same classes, so he had all the materials.
My ex-wife was brand new to teaching so had to develop curriculum on top of this. She worked 7am-5pm every day plus weekends.
Calling parents, dealing with kids with special needs, developing curriculum, marking, department meetings, making lesson plans, running extra-curricular activities or clubs, private lessons, doing paperwork or photocopying, etc etc, it all mounts up. There's a lot of behind the scenes work.
Now, some teachers simply don't do this. You can easily skate by, work the bare minimum 6 hour days, and not give two shits about the kids. But most teachers care about children and education (I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money).
My wife’s school is big on community, which is great in some ways but leads to long days with staff expected to attend dances, games, etc.
Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI.
In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to enter data in all the fields, so to enter attendance for a whole class you had to scroll left and right with the mouse for each child.
It crashed every morning for months. Teachers would coordinate with each other to ensure they didn't overload the system.
Before: you take a stack of papers, and go through each one with a red pen.
Now: you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait... the stupid tests are auto-graded, but chances are there is still something you have to grade student-by-student, and that's now slower to do. Plus, obviously, the usual annoyances (got to update this, got to reboot that, my typing is 5WPM, etc etc).
You know, if someone wants to write The Next Great JS framework, give me one that above all else prioritizes latency and expert-level usage. There's no fundamental reason we can't have most of the nice things from the modern graphical web, and get to the legendary efficiency of those text-based consoles... but it will take some work and thought. (For example, you're going to need to insert yourself in between the user and the browser's concept of events, so you can buffer up commands the user is typing while their target hasn't quite loaded yet. This is one of the fundamental reasons why GUIs are less efficient than TUIs, though by no means the only one.)
This framework won't take over the world, but it sure would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Sooooo tiiiiirrrrreeeeed of programs that take seconds to do every... little... thing!
I remember having to use educational software in college for a discussion board and it was terrible and sucky. I could only imagine what the teacher end of it looked like.
—-
For a comedic look at how this affects teaching, the new comedy show Abbott Elentary has an episode on this. It’s like Parks and Rec but at an inner city Philadelphia public school.