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silence_kit posted:According to the following BLS survey, this is unusual. The average full-time teacher works about 40 hours a week, which is a pretty reasonable workweek, IMO. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf I remember at about the time I graduated from high school, public school teachers in my hometown successfully negotiated for a shorter workday of seven hours. A shorter physical workday does not mean less hours, because work for a teacher does not stop when their contract ends. Just from your data alone, I am seeing: -"Teachers employed full time worked 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 fewer minutes per Saturday than other full-time professionals. On Sundays, teachers and other professionals worked, on average, about the same amount of time." So, starting here as a baseline (assuming everyone is working outside of contract hours), Teachers are only working about 3 hours less than the average professional - which, considering I am contract for about 7 hours a day does make sense, since my work day is shorter. But then we start getting into the extra work: -"Thirty percent of teachers worked at home on an average day, compared with 20 percent of other full-time professionals." Nearly 1/3rd of the teacher workforce works at home EVERY day, vs. 1/5th of the professional workforce. No numbers attached. Here's the important one: -"Teachers were more likely to work on a Sunday than were other full-time professionals. Fifty-one percent of teachers worked on an average Sunday, compared with 30 percent of other full-time professionals." 50% of the teacher workforce is working on sunday. Half vs. 1/3rd. And again, there are no numbers attached to this, so we don't know how long they are working (although the worktime spike chart probably gives us an idea). And there's even a statement that does back up outside of contract work as well: -"At any hour during the 8-hour stretch between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m., 25 percent to 30 percent of teachers who did at least some work that day were working." Most contract days end a little after 3PM, so we'll write off the first hour, but that's still an extra 7 hours in which teachers are putting in extra work, every day. Even if we take this at a generous baseline of "a teacher works an extra hour a day", that's now 2 hours over the average professional work day we discussed initially, and not including Saturday or Sunday. And there's a good chance that what this ACTUALLY means is "most teachers are working for this 7 hour stretch because you can pick an hour and 30% of them will be working." Someone who is more familiar with study language can refute me on that if I'm wrong. So, your data is pretty telling in supporting that most teachers work AT LEAST 2-4 hours beyond the typical 40 hour work week a week, and again, that's assuming a very general baseline and putting in some guesswork on my part because there really aren't many numbers attached to the study you've linked. In my experience? Most teachers get 1 45-55min prep a day in a typical school system / 1 100 minute prep every other day in a full block, which is the only time that we have during our 7 hour work day for anything that's not teaching, because we're not doing a lot of grading while we have students in our room. That's also ignoring things teachers do during their preps like responding to e-mails and phonecalls, going to special ed meetings, parent conferences, etc. The average teacher has between 5-6 classes a day, with let's say (again a generous) 30 students a day. On any given day that is between 110-180 HW assignments coming in a day, which need to be graded. I guarantee that is not going to take that single hour at home that would put them at 44 hours. I'd love to see another study with actual numbers attached, and I'd love to see more specifically what you are citing from this one that is showing a "reasonable" 40 hour work week? Oh, and final "fun fact" regarding "well teachers work so little during the summer, look at the data!" - I am only paid for 11 out of the 12 months of the year. This is not uncommon.
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Feb 9, 2017 18:42
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KiteAuraan posted:Is there a good resource on charter school performance by state, and includes data on students that were kicked out for under performing or being special ed, along with relevant state regulations and if that makes an impact? Or is that data more dispersed and obfuscated? Yeah, this is actually something I have always wondered about as well. I worked briefly for a charter school that advertised "100% college placement!," but I'm fairly certain that was fabricated because I rotated between 4 school sites on a 2 week basis, so when I would return to school sites after 6 weeks my roster would be dramatically different because kids were no longer attending. It's easy to achieve 100% placement when you only keep the kids who want to go to college and are doing well?
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Feb 9, 2017 18:44
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BigFactory posted:That's saying that at any given hour between 2 and 10, 25-30% of teachers are working, not that that 30% is working 7 extra hours per day. Between 2 and 6 nearly 100% of other professions are working. Your average teacher puts in an hour or two of work at some point between 2 and 10 every day, but still works fewer hours per week than many other professions. We all start at 8, though, and most of the working world starts at 9. Average teacher work day: 8-3, plus 1-2 hours a day = 8-9 hours a day Average professional work day: 9-5, plus 1-2 hours a day = 9-10 hours a day So again, this is in line with us having an hour shorter work day every day, but does not account for the 50% Sunday time, which AT A BASELINE would even it out to totally even. Pushing a narrative that "teachers work far less than working professionals" is untrue, and I would still wager that if we had some data with actual numbers attached rather than blanket "well they are working" you would find that teachers ARE working far more than the average working professional. Or the other option is that every single teacher in the nation has weekly meetings where we come up with ways to fabricate how hard our lives are so we can...complain? I don't even know. Why would every teacher in the world say "it sucks that I work so many unpaid hours just to make my job be BASELINE FUNCTIONAL" if it weren't the case?
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Feb 9, 2017 19:40
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BigFactory posted:Most offices open at 8 but everyone's in at 7. 9 to 5's been a myth for a long time. And if you look at that study it showed that teachers work more than average on sunday (but not by a lot) and less than average on saturday (again, not by a lot), and still work fewer hours a week on average. Sure, when you also present data showing that most working professionals work 7-5 every day! 
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Feb 9, 2017 21:38
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Uh, it shows teachers working less than other professionals by 2-3 hours a week, as I have shown. It also has data with no numbers attached that creates a variable "any given hour", and that's fairly anecdotal? "Any given hour" would absolutely cover a teacher who says "I typically work another 2-3 hours every night grading," as someone like myself would say, as on "any given hour" for those 2-3 hours that teacher is indeed working. So I don't think the data is WRONG but I think you are interpreting it in a completely misleading way in order to prove a point that teachers shouldn't be little whiny baby's because working professionals work FAR harder than them, which seems supported by your citation of longer work day hours without any data.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:47
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Furthermore, here is some data compiled by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in 2012 which found that, on average, teachers work 10 hours and 40 minutes every day: https://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full.pdf Data on page 15, methodology at the beginning.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:53
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BigFactory posted:The data is derived from surveys conducted by the Department of Labor. That "any given hour" statistic isn't misleading. Maybe you're misunderstanding it. What do you teach? Is your question here implying that because I don't teach Statistics or Math or any other data related subject that clearly, as a lazy teacher, I couldn't possibly be able to comprehend the data correctly? I can't see any other reason why you would ask me my subject here. And it is possible I am misunderstanding it because I said initially "correct me if I'm wrong, I might be misunderstanding this!" But from what you are saying, "on any given hour" would cover a teacher who works 45min a day and a teacher who works 3 hours a day and contribute to the findings in the same manner. Is that incorrect?
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Feb 9, 2017 21:58
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Someone is more than welcome to explain to me why I am misreading that statement, then, since you are correct that I do not teach statistics!
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Feb 9, 2017 22:08
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shovelbum posted:I would say that people who are already in a position to have a college degree (most a masters) should refuse to work for those wages, and should not pursue those opportunities as students. A massive teacher shortage would kind of force the issue more than grinning and bearing it does. We already have a massive teacher shortage. It is not changing anything. It's a systematic problem because until everyone in the world stops assuming we are lazy and don't know what we are doing (and that they can do it better than us), it won't change.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:00
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I mean what happens at zero custodial staff across the entire country? You're never going to get to zero teachers. Yes if every single teacher in the country struck at the same time we'd probably get poo poo done but that's not going to happen.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:04
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silence_kit posted:Please present this data, if you think that the survey I linked is somehow suspect. IMO, you haven't really presented a good case for why the ~40 hours a week number in the survey is wrong. I did! Quidthulhu posted:Furthermore, here is some data compiled by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in 2012 which found that, on average, teachers work 10 hours and 40 minutes every day:
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Feb 10, 2017 00:05
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And also that we have no unifying governing agency because all of our unions are state by state and all of our standards are state by state etc. etc. etc.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:06
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Ah, there it is, the namecalling that comes with having no actual points to substantiate your argument but a deeply rooted and non-truthful bias. Are you racist too?
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Feb 10, 2017 04:41
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I think a big part of why trade stuff like auto shop and wood shop are vanishing is because (the predominant narrative / theory / truth / whatever you want to call it being pushed) is that students can't make a living in skilled trade anymore, because the global economy won't allow for it. The beginning of the 2016 school year our keynote speaker and the thread of our entire school direction was Response to Intervention, and a big thread of that was that where our parents could have not graduated from high school and died comfortably after working a middle-middle-class trade job, that wasn't something our students could do anymore. Kids basically HAVE to go to college in order to be successful. My personal experience when I was young, a terrible student, and didn't want to go to college was that this was going to be true, and that was 12 years ago. The real reason we might be seeing specialized skillset courses vanishing is because nobody is going to go in to them? Thoughts?
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Feb 10, 2017 05:00
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litany of gulps posted:That is such a crazy idea, though! The trades are one of the few job categories insulated from globalization. There isn't any loving Chinese electrician coming to fix the hosed up wiring in your light switch. There's no Indian plumber fixing your lovely clogged toilet. Nobody in another country is fixing your busted rear end car. Some of my most successful students have been kids that went into trades. I think the idea isn't global economy in the sense that you're competing against other people to make sure you maintain a job, I think it's more that BECAUSE there's more competition in everything across the board the salaries for jobs with degrees has rocketed up along with the baseline salary standard of living, while blue collar job wages have remained the same, and therefore you can't survive as an electrician / car mechanic / teacher because you aren't getting paid a living wage anymore. Of course maybe the solution should be to paid skilled labor a living wage, hurm
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Feb 10, 2017 05:20
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Wow, I would not have thought the advocate for Transgender Student Rights would have been Betsy freaking DeVos of all people
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Feb 22, 2017 18:16
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A friend posted this on Facebook and I have many feels about it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mom-declares-her-daughter-is-done-with-homework-in-viral-email_us_59020abbe4b0af6d718c4fcb TL;DR the mother has watched her 10 year old slowly get more and more stressed about her homework and seen her workload increase a bunch and sent an e-mail to the principal nope-ing out of any remaining HW for the rest of the year. While I agree that there's a pretty big pitfall in education still of just slapping down a shitton of busy work and there definitely is a point of too much homework, I don't think "no more homework sorry" is the right answer unless the teacher has set up the class in such a way so that the reinforcement of concepts isn't needed to be done at home. And maybe this school isn't great at that, maybe this is a ton of busywork and this is a justified e-mail, I don't know the lady or the kid or the school she's at. But if I had a parent who told me "my student isn't going to be doing your homework any more" I'd be pretty P.O.'d, because I work real hard to make sure my homework is relevant and reinforces their learning. Furthermore, for something like secondary education, yes, they're in school all day, but they don't see every subject every day unless they're one of the remaining schools that still does a traditional schedule (pretty rare around California), and for that reason ALONE they need to reinforce the stuff they're learning. It's also not comparable to a job because for the most part you have learned the skillsets needed to do your job in a very specialized manner, and if you need to learn something new you do it on your own time in a self directed manner or you take courses in your own time to be guided. The majority of children do not yet know how to do self-directed learning and that is another area where homework is preparing them with good practices on how to be lifelong learners. Her daughter has a lot of self-drive, which is fantastic, but chidlren aren't a blanket statement & for everyone to take her individual daughter's experience and blanketly apply it to "all homework is bad down with homework" is annoying. Thoughts? To me, homework is inherently good; busy work, for the most part, isn't, but you can't point to all homework and say "that's just busy work."
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May 2, 2017 01:07
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Again, I teach high school, but our district policy is 30min a night per subject. At 6 subjects typically taken by students, that translates to 3 hours a night of homework. Yes, that should definitely be reduced for a 10 year old, but even 15min per subject is still 1.5 hours if she's doing a typical math, English, social studies, science, and then two extra subjects. Admittedly I have zero idea how elementary educators assign subjects over a day but are we saying 15-30 minutes a subject is overkill?
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May 2, 2017 02:43
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For a ten year old, yes.
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May 2, 2017 02:50
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Because as you progress through your education to higher level tasks they take longer to complete as you are learning how to do them? When are you suggesting students should reinforce and independently practice the material they have learned in order to complete the transfer to prior knowledge, so that they are able to then do it without reference or assistance?
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May 2, 2017 03:04
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But your job assumes a level of automatic ability in your given field that you arrive at through study and due diligence, and children do not have that. For example, in my AP Music Theory class, about halfway through the school year we begin the practice of Part Writing, which means filling in chords from a given bass line. For students first starting this, it's a very new skillset, and a single chord progression can take upwards of 30 minutes to complete because they have to double check their work against rules (of which there a many, which I scaffold and add as we go along in our learning, which means more practice time), there's a good chance they did it wrong and have to start portions of it over (which as they go along and make these mistakes they learn what to look for / better ways to approach the mechanics of doing it, more learning and practice required), and they need to be able to get to a point where they can do it indpedently because that's the whole point and my point of assessment is to ask "can you do this by yourself now." Eventually, at the end of the year for the AP test they are expected to complete this individual learning task in 15min. As an expert in my field who has done this process a shitton, I can do one on the board in 5 minutes. So think of anything you do in your work day that is expected to be mechanic just to function. You had to learn that somewhere. It takes 10,000 hours to be a master of something, right? Half of that is maybe competent, but requires a baseline understanding of some foundational mechanics to be competent at your job. How did you get there? Did you do it all in class, guided, with a manual in front of you? Do you still work that way? Would you be hired of.you did? Or did at some point someone say "study this and practice at home so you can do it on your own without assistance," because....that's what you needed to be able to do to have a baseline skillset for your chosen profession and expertise area?
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May 2, 2017 03:59
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So this is all they would do? Because you just took up two entire class periods at the very least for conferences with 15 kids and nothing else why they worked indoendently. When would they learn how to do the tasks necessary for this project?
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May 3, 2017 08:01
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