Which subject area teachers have the most reasonable work load?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really depends on how much you're putting into it. Some math teachers take as much time to grade tests as English teachers take to grade essays - the math teachers are not just checking for right answers, they are going over all of the work the students have shown. They will mark something like "This is where you went wrong - 7x2 is 14, not 16" or something.

Some science teachers do interactive notebooks and take forever to grade those.

Some English teachers don't give detailed feedback on their students' writing and so it doesn't take that long.

I guess I’m most interested in the amount of time it takes to plan lessons.

DH and I both teach. Very different disciplines and different grade levels though we both teach in highly rigorous, admissions only programs. It takes us about the same amount of time to plan lessons, but the planning looks different. I might spend an hour reading a text and taking my own notes before I actually begin to compose the materials and tasks for students. He might need to spend an hour tinkering with whatever they will build and photograph each step. I would say that for each DL lesson, there’s probably 90 to 120 min of planning time. Non-DL was much less. DL is like producing a live news program (one of my children did that for a living).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know what planning is at middle school but planning time is much longer for high school from elementary. My sister taught elementary and other than short specials had no planning. In my high school I have a built in period off, 90 minutes, plus lunch each day.

While subject areas could differ it depends on the teacher. I’m a high school special education teacher and rate myself as a solid B teacher, and have never aspired to be an A. I value my work life balance. If I was an A teacher I could spend much more time planning. However, I thankfully have been in the profession for almost 15 years. I have watched many of the A level teachers burn out and leave the profession. I believe my experience and B level effort is better than a new teacher who works themselves into burnout and leaving at A level effort.

It concerns me that we think A teachers can’t have work-life balance. If that is true, teachers should be paid five, six times what they currently earn.

It is true.