If you assume they work only 8 month of the year, then you probably don't know too many teachers.

The work for an math or physical education teacher is a lot less than for an English teacher. Grading long essays take a lot of time. Grammar School is also less time demanding than high school for time used to prepare and grading papers.

Can't speak for physical education, but I've taught basic maths to adults for a long time, and I work with English teachers and ESOL teachers.

A key concept in teaching is what we call 'differentiation', the idea that different students will need a different approach. A good model for HN people here would be (say) a computer game. If a game is too easy, you get bored. If the game is impossibly challenging, you give up. A well designed game that develops you has to be pitched at the right level for you. Individually.

English differentiates by student response to a common task.

Maths differentiates by topic.

So, the English teacher can (for example) set a title for a piece of writing and the whole class can work on that for say half an hour, and each person can feel that they have done their best. The teacher has to mark the pieces and that is where the differentiation comes in: one student might have shown really good progress by producing sentences organised into paragraphs, another student might have explored a metaphor and developed a simile, but might have been 'phoning it in' compared to their previous performance. Marking a class set of work and providing feedback to each student is where the time goes.

In my maths class, some students just need different work to other students. Some students will finish a lot quicker than other students. So my work is more on identifying and producing resources, skill development exercises and enrichment activities than the marking. Mind you, the marking still takes time. As a concrete example, how long do you think it would take to mark a worksheet like [1]?

[1] http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf

What do they do in the 3-4 months off each year? They're not attending their schools.

No teacher in the US is off for 3-4 months (summer break in the US is only ~10 weeks to begin with). During summer breaks teachers take classes, renew certifications, prepare lesson plans, tutor, return early to setup classrooms and otherwise prep for the upcoming school year. During the school year, teachers work before and after the students arrive, meet with parents/school officials and get things ready for the day. They also as work weekends grading papers/projects/etc and otherwise organize the upcoming week ahead. Hours can be long and arduous during the year and the amount of actual vacation time available to be off is equivalent to a typical office worker (3-4 weeks at best). Source: in-laws/wife are all teachers.

As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years.

The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.

Useless anecdote incoming, but after always reading the many hastily posted defenses posted after anyone claims that teachers get to take summer off, I asked a friend who started teaching a few years ago. He said that you do indeed get most of the summer off. Few conferences you might have to attend, some teachers take second jobs, etc. Granted, he's a really smart guy and probably has less difficulty than others making lesson plans, but seems like a good gig if you have decent time management skills and enjoy the privilege of teaching the next generation.

I'm sure it depends heavily on the district, but the "teachers are the hardest workers!" tagline always seemed like an easy story to tell to (justifiably) ask for wage increases.

"gasp They have to grade homework at home!". Well, yeah, I have to take office work home as well as the United States has no labor laws preventing that.

> As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years.

Lesson plans change frequently and aside from some macro-level planning, re-use is quite difficult from year-to-year. Some children also have individualized lesson plans that require more attention.

> The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.

Again, they are not off the entire ten weeks. They have work obligations to fulfill during the summer. Furthermore, during the school year, teachers work just about every weekend and not 'the occasional weekend'.

They work at home on non-contact tasks including planning coherent sequences of lessons, and 'differentiating' the approach within each lesson for lower quartile, median and upper quartile students. There may also be discrete special learning needs (e.g a deaf student who communicates exclusively by sign language and who will have an interpreter and a note taker present, a student with Asperger's, a student with type 1 diabetes and significant eyesight impairment, a student with pronounced dyslexia).

Within the planning process, you often have to allow for significant changes in the syllabus content and mode of assessment.

There is usually staff training provided by school management, and career progression in teaching is linked to taking on extra responsibility.

Now, a very interesting question is why do we have the long summer holidays still? Lets face it, a very small proportion of the population work on farms these days. Changing that would have to be a big bang change of course. The whole system would need to move over to a new school year in one go, which is probably why no government has done it yet.

I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? In the UK we have the national curriculum bit but teachers are still scrabbling around for resources and activities.

> I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it?

That's what we do in France. In most cases, it works rather well.

The main problem is that it means that every change has to be synchronized nation-wide, which is time and resource consuming. Also, since it's national, it can quickly become a national cause, both for the government (who sometimes decide to change the curriculum for purely political reasons) and for some parts the opposition (« No, that's not how you do Sex Ed! », or such).

Also, we're not too good at handling edge cases (e.g. students with special needs, gifted students, students in places where most parents don't speak French).

Interesting, I'm wondering if the standardised lesson plans and schemes are available on a Web site somewhere, and so I'm googling with my schoolboy French right now.

Are your teachers noticeably less busy by the way?