Teachers Working Past Contract Hours

Nerves

            I want to admit something: I was nervous about being a teacher. While that should surprise few regular readers of this blog, who would be familiar with my history of anxiety, it was more than just my personality, which created my hesitancy. In addition to having a mom and an aunt who are teachers, I wasn’t a stranger to the amount of teacher related drama in media and popular culture. Teachers are simultaneously consistently considered undervalued and overpaid, taken for granted and incessant complainers. Teachers do what most people would never want to do and shouldn’t whine about their pay because they get the summers off. Although I understand that those statements generally don’t all come from the same person or even the same group of people. It is generally off putting.

Debate

            Even when I realized, that I would rather be underpaid and societally undervalued, than work a job I didn’t genuinely enjoy, I still was worried about my ability to handle the workload. Teachers regularly talk about the long nights they spend grading, the days they spend all day at the school long after the school day has technically ended, and the overall debate about working contract hours. To those unfamiliar, let me fill you in. Most teachers have a set amount of time that they are contractually paid for. In the cases where there is no contract, teachers still have hours they are expected to work like a ‘regular 9-5’ job. For me, my hours are 7:30-3:30.

An Argument

This is the argument that those who believe teachers are paid fairly make: Since teachers generally have the summer off*, the pay teachers receive is fair. Those who believe teachers are paid unfairly tend to bring up those other points that I mentioned earlier: taking work home, staying late, etc.

Response to Reality

However, whether teachers are paid fairly or not is an entirely different post.** I am more interested in looking at teacher’s response to the current pay reality. Throughout the teacher profession, there is a growing number of teachers who are refusing to work outside of their contract hours. They get done what they can get done during the school day and then they go home just like people who work a ‘regular’ job. They accept that papers and tests won’t be graded as fast, lessons might not be as watertight, and classrooms might not be as aesthetically immaculate as they could be. When the last bell rings, they pack up all their stuff, go home, and put their feet up and manage to not feel incredibly worried about what their colleagues, principals, parents, students and society think about them.

Do They Exist?

If you can’t tell I sincerely doubt the existence of those teachers who manage to pull that off flawlessly every day with no concerns for 180-some days per school year. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I think that they have to be nervous and question themselves at least every once in a while. But maybe that’s just my anxiety. The reason behind my thinking though is grounded in the experience of veterans of the teaching profession like my mother, aunt, teachers, education professors, colleagues and teachers of reddit. Oh yes there is a r/teachers subreddit where the educators of the future from all over the world (but like everywhere mostly the US) come to discuss issues such as classroom management and how to schedule your own bathroom breaks.

Overwhelmed

When I was going through my teacher’s education program in college, it seemed as everyone kept telling me the same things. One of those hyper-repeated talking points was that first-year teachers are overwhelmed. I literally had one professor tell me that I needed to expect my first 5 years of teaching to be literally hell and that after that I might be able to enjoy myself. With a perspective like that is it surprising she had recently left the teaching field to go back to graduate school to get her PhD? While most people I spoke to and read their reddit posts weren’t that negative. There was a large consensus that fist year teachers are very stressed.

 Divergence

Part of it is due to the fact that besides student teaching most have not managed a classroom before and certainly generally not on their own. The newness of everything definitely always played a role in why these first year teachers in the more-experienced teachers’ minds were always running around frazzled. But another contributing factor was time-management. This is when the talking points would diverge. Some would claim that it was impossible to escape the enormous workload. Others claimed it was impossible to escape it your first year, but that with practice you could work to corral work to remain at work.

Common Question

Amidst the reddit posts of r/teachers, the topic of working contract hours consistently comes up. Posts like: “NotEverything Needs to Be Graded” and  “How Can I Avoid Being Overwhelmed?” Tons of teachers want strategies in order to reduce their workloads to contract hours. Some teachers don’t want these strategies though. They have what is referred to as a martyr complex. They believe they have to sacrifice all of their time and energy for the kids that they teach even if that comes at great cost to their families and personal mental and physical health. I do not want to blame these teachers for anything; I simply want to point of that this is a type of teacher that exists and it’s often found in the more experienced teachers or in the newest teachers.

My Experience

What’s my experience been? Well I would have assumed that I would be the martyr teacher. However, whether because I’ve slowly chilled out over the years or whether pure exhaustion is keeping me, I don’t work once I leave for the day. If there’s some training that I just want to get over with, or I am curious about whether my students have done well on the quiz, then I voluntarily do. Otherwise, I don’t. I would feel guilty, yet I was advised by enough professors and mentors to leave work at home as much as I can. So I don’t.

Other Teachers from My Generation

While I can’t know for sure, it seems as though my colleagues who are around the same age as me don’t take work home with them as well. Does this mean we don’t try our best or don’t care? Of course not, we care deeply. At the same time we realize we can’t teach effectively if we don’t rest occasionally. We don’t discuss openly the fact that we don’t take work home with us. The individual in charge of our school said the reason teachers are paid salary instead of hourly is that if we were paid hourly no one could afford to pay us for the work we do. So this means that he realizes that the teachers that work under him are unfairly compensated, because if we billed by the hour for the work that we do, then we would earn significantly more. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do in my situation to right this. I can only do whatever is possible in my power to limit my working hours to those I am supposed to actually work.

What about you?

Have you heard of working contract hours? Have you met a martyr teacher? Did you used to be a Martyr teacher?  What was the advice you received in regards to working contract hours?

Notes:

*Barring summer school and curriculum planning and research and all those other things most people don’t think about…but that’s not part of their argument.

**Let me know if you want to hear my thoughts on it!

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