‘Normal hours’ for teachers not logical
‘Normal hours’ for teachers not logical
Recently a politician suggested that teachers should be made to work “normal hours” — basically 48 weeks from 9 to 5 so that they wouldn’t have massive holidays and be home before peak traffic.
Like many political ideas, they seem reasonable till someone in the industry looks at it. As a practitioner, I know that it’s not possible to do all the work, especially correction, during the day. From the parent point of view, there would be no after-school sport, musical concerts, school camps or parent/teacher nights.
However, this being said, I am sure all teachers would be happy if this was possible as it would greatly reduce their working hours, although also probably the level of classroom preparation and thus the quality of the lessons presented.
It’s a good thing this logic is not applied to all occupations. Imagine what would happen if police went home at 5 p.m. or hospital emergency rooms shut down then.
Dennis Fitzgerald, Melbourne, Australia
Mr. Fitzgerald is mixing apples with oranges. Police and emergency rooms are staffed 24/7/365 by shifts. Not anywhere near the same as school teachers. Don’t understand his point at all.
Aloha Dennis, not sure how you guys do things down under but here in the Upper 50, FYI: we have three 8 hour shifts in 24 hours for emergency services like police, fire, and ambulance, some of which are on standby if only at “headquarters “. Hospitals and the like are staffed 24 hours in as many shifts necessary.
Teachers in America have never had it easy as to time on and off campus to prepare classes and tend to all the paperwork required much less deal with the wiseacres in every classroom and providing adequate learning latitude for the those too fast and too slow learners in the same classroom.
More hours would be cruel and unusual punishment.
Teacher requirement #1 starts with dedication which they who have a career at it must have.
Hats off to them all.
Mahalo,
Charles
Education was once a pathway for the privileged. It has transitioned to become a highway for the masses. Such being the case, we have wound up with traffic jams; snarled modes of confusion and delays; control systems of irrelevant outcomes determining “successes and failures” which literally have nothing to do with developing skills, abilities, interests, and talents in each individual child. When and if there may be a major paradigm shift in focusing the purposes and intents of education to place emphasis on the joys and desire of learning or acquiring skills and information deemed to be useful and beneficial, the system will remain, in many cases, like a “covered wagon” before the automobile ewas invented!