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Comment by Prcmaker | Hacker News Reader

With getting no overtime, no time off in lieu, and managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency', I'm glad to see this happen. If it will actually make a difference though, I'm yet to be convinced.

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It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.

The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr).

Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.

Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning.

I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week lead-time task in addition.

During holidays she's definitely more relaxed, but still spends an absolute sh*tload of time preparing lessons for next term.

She's specifically on one end of the spectrum, but that's also what it takes to get a class of up to 30 students to actually pay attention and make some worthwhile progress at their schooling. She chooses it though, she loves it, she lives for it.

I couldn't do it to that degree without going insane.

That's amazing, but all-too rare. I think teachers have a very tough job, and many (most?) of them are not very good it at. My kids have had teachers who constantly shift assignment due dates because they're not ready, half-arse their lesson planning and tell the kids to do the rest at home, and are generally unable to manage a classroom.

> That's amazing, but all-too rare.

No, it's abusive and indicative of a failing system. We should not be celebrating overwork. If a system needs its workers to be doing double- or triple-time to function at the desired level, then the system is not working well and is on its way to failure.

I actually think it's both.

She would spend that amount of time anyway, because "it's what she does".

It would be possible to achieve 90% of her results with maybe 70% of the time and effort that she puts in. But even at 70% it still would run into non-trivial "enforced overtime".

I think it's also a lot more work for new teachers since they can't reuse lesson plans.

I think it's probably quite possible after a few years to be a good teacher and also not spend all your free time marking and preparing lesson plans... but it's still hard work and underpaid. I'll stick with my overpaid and stress free programming job, thanks!

A lot of assignments can be partially machine graded, even if they think they can’t be.

Teachers are usually luddites though…

Not necessarily luddites, but lack having a development team available for potential streamlining. Also the Government Department not setting the industry up to allow such streamlining (with a strong asterisk noting that such streamlining may actually be worse for learning outcomes, no matter how much better it would be for freeing up a teacher's time).

This person actually uses ChatGPT to generate report comments "around" the core themes that need to be pointed out in the report. She's said that it's saved a lot of time that would be spent on the "fluff" that wraps around the central message. I think this is one of the perfect use cases for an LLM; "fluff" generation, not the crucial message.

"Machine grading" would be something that the "machine" would have to be tuned for, which is Government Department level jurisdiction, and pretty well outside the skill set of teachers in general (I would think).

When you say preparing lesson plans, is that like printing out worksheets or is it literally planning out what the lesson is going to be?

I'm not a teacher so am obviously missing context, but I don't understand how this part isn't standardised for every teacher following the same curriculum.

It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

Experienced teachers likely have it down. Or can just use whatever was done in previous years. But you have set standards changed every 10-20 years at least. And maybe new textbook that has things in bit different order. Or there is some topical thing. Lesson planning is really looking at book and items there thinking how much time going over it with current group takes and then considering what items or things are needed in addition to reach those goals for this lesson.

If you had to make a 1/2 hour presentation/workshop, there is some planning involved even if you can just copy paste the slides and training material.

Okay, I get it now. Lesson plans are something that can only be done on the fly and are more about adapting to things outside the control of the teacher e.g. one lesson took longer due to a disruption in the classroom.

I was wondering why the people who set the curriculum couldn't just make a year's worth of lesson plans and email them to each teacher. Thanks for the explainer (to everyone who replied).

Lesson plans are inherently individual to a teacher. So even if a year’s worth of lesson plans was created and shared, and even if I thought they were good, it would still take non-negligible time for me to absorb them and mentally plan how I was going to use them.

That’s the tip of the iceberg in my attempt to explain the complexity of teaching.

It probably depends on the country, but in my country (Germany), the government only defines outlines of what knowledge and skills the students are expected to acquire. The teachers are expected to design a specific curriculum to convey these skills (though obviously constrained by outside factors, most prominently the available set of textbooks).

Planning out what the lesson is going to be.

You have 20-30 kids with varying backgrounds, skill levels and learning habits. Some require challenges to figure out things on their own, others explicitly explanations. Some work well in a group, others need individual attention. Some go through a rough patch at home or with friends and are distracted. Some days are hot and you make no progress.

A teacher needs to respond to the dynamics in a large group of non adults, every day, every minute. You can’t plan that out in advance. Sure, experience helps to make the planning easier and to respond to situations you’ve seen before, but still, every day is different, and responding to the challenges in the last lesson requires a plan.

You’re going to get meme responses about why this is the case from Americans who have never been to countries with centralized education systems, but the only reason that America doesn’t do this is our strong federalism and decentralized, local, education system.

> It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

This is quite an appropriate way of putting it. It is like that, but there's no real specification as to the quality and length of said text book.

Some teachers create a textbook of stick figure drawings. Others create a textbook of coherent progressive storylines that build on each other using a logical set of figures and well-labelled diagrams that explain the concepts and outcomes that cater to different learning styles.

Now I'm getting out of my depth a bit, as I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the detail of her work, but I believe there is (much?) more opportunity for re-use of materials from one year to the next, thus minimising custom work. But I also believe that she prefers to do it all "custom" for her own (perfectionist? obsessive?) reasons.

As a math teacher in the states some years back, I worked 6:30 am to 4pm in the building and from and a couple hours most evenings and usually 3-6 hours both days of the weekend. 70+ hours a week. Any holiday was spent catching up on grading. I often recruited my wife to help grade it was so overwhelming. And summer meant trainings and summer school otherwise the summer was unpaid and as a teacher we desperately needed the money.

All in, I averaged three separate weeks (one at Christmas, and one week on either side of summer) a year of stay-cation since we could barely afford food let alone travel.

When I transitioned to software, I nearly cut my hours in half and doubled my pay, nearly 4x-ing my effective hourly wage and had my first real vacation; heck, my first time on a plane even.

a 9-3 school day for students means an 8-4 work day for teachers, minimum. that eats up the 40hr week right there, even for a teacher working the bare minimum.

This isn't addressing unpaid hours, just the expectation than your boss or coworkers can communicate with you after hours. Unpaid hours is already illegal. How to enforce that in the education system without it collapsing is the open question.

> managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency'

I'm working on a theory around "organisational ADHD". Based on 20 years of experience in, basically, "today's problem always overrules yesterday's priority" and how this negatively affects efficiency, quality, and throughput of an organisation.

And that this behaviour is generally created, encouraged, and facilitated by (bad / immature) management, who should be doing, essentially, the opposite.

Australia doesn't have a problem with people doing work outside work hours... not even close. That's why this was so easy to pass.

That's not to say that there will never be exceptions against the laws.

I mean the FWC can straight up fine the company, and in general our commissions & ombudsmans are pretty decently run. It'll have an effect, I'm sure.

I would like to see that happen, however, the current available guidance from FWC is worded very with a vast deal of of flexibility in it, and is highly open to interpretation. A manager may, in theory, decide any person responsible for any task may be contacted outside of hours. I've not seen anything truly restrictive.

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