I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).
Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.
Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.
I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.
An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.
When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.
Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
Yes
> like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
No
Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?
Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.
You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.
Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.
It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.
Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.
There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?
Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.
During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are
- Coaching sports
- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities
- Making/updating lesson plans
- Presiding over detention
- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time
- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)
During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).