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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

> 40-60 hours at school.

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.

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My dad and ex-wife were both teachers.

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).

Is there a consensus among teachers if year-around schooling will help or exacerbate this problem?

I haven't talked to any teachers about this specifically, but based on my impression of the school system and public philosophy around schools and teaching that I've gleaned from my wife and many friends who are teachers, I think it might help in the short term but be worse in the long term. The one thing that seems nearly constant is that expectations of teachers are always increasing. So I think eventually we'd end up back in a similar place except teachers would have to keep the pace year round rather than getting a couple months off in the summer.

Office hours, tutoring, mandatory training, meetings, clubs, etc. can really add up.

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.

Another fascinating thing about teacher claims of working hours is how technology apparently hasn't moved the needle at all. Lots of schools have moved to more and more online assignments that can be in large part automatically graded yet the time spend grading remains constant, or so they claim.

I bet most of the software they use just sucks. I've had some first hand folks tell me some of the bad stories of using various online grade book systems, and years ago I built one myself, and the accommodations people were requiring were... fairly complex. I suspect that at least in some cases I'm aware of, the vendor just lies and says "yes, we support X", gets the contract, and the end users (teachers) have to deal with the lie.

That's probably because IT busywork replaces manual busywork.

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 log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait..."

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!

Also, the UX is usually awful.

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.

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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.

Ugh, should say Elementary.

Have you ever worked with education software? I have. It's awful.

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.

If that's true, person in charge of purchasing is asleep at the wheel. With the most politically powerful union in the US, teachers could replace them if they wanted too (although the same union likely protects the jobs of the people who can't buy software).

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