Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Most teachers don't have doctorate degrees.
Many teachers have a master's degree plus 30 graduate credits, which is an option on many districts' salary scales, including the FCPS scale. Please check facts before spouting off.
And the PP is absolutely correct that the unpaid holidays (which don't count towards the 195 paid contract days) have really stretched out the school year. This shortens the window for teachers to increase their income over the summer.
Oh please, we all know these education masters degrees and "graduate credits" are BS. Not actual rigorous coursework that shows anything.
Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Teachers work 10 months max, which includes significant vacation time that most Americans can only dream of.
But, they’d be working fewer months and kids would have a better education if we got rid of all of this stupid days off and compress the year into five day weeks.
Anonymous wrote:As a local government employee (not FCPS) I would beg to differ that $75k is not in line with other professions...I work 5/days a week and get federal holidays off- however any other time I have 15 days of PTO to use - in addition my job requires after hours work all the time...thats not "planned" or accounted for until the calendar comes out a month ahead of the meetings. While I would never say a teachers job is easy- I wouldn't quite say they are treated unfairly. Many teachers I know love summers off and it is a main driver for them- so to use that against the world is a little skewed.
I agree with this. I also work for local government and many people are working a full year schedule at this salary or lower salaries. Yes with masters degrees too.
Salary was never one of my main concerns. There were years in which I thought the raise/COLA (if it was even given) was insufficient, but for the most part I always felt the salary was decent.
Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Teachers work 10 months max, which includes significant vacation time that most Americans can only dream of.
I sense a tinge of resentment in your post. If you want that, then step up and join me in the classroom. Please come stand with me side by side and do this work for $75K.
LOL, nope. Just tired of hearing teachers complain about low pay when they only work for about 80% of the year and get well over a month of paid vacation.
There is no paid vacation. I make 2/3 of what my my federal employee spouse makes and they have a bachelors and I have a masters + 30 additional graduate credits in education. I make less than half of my same-age peers in the private sector/government consultants make.
Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Teachers work 10 months max, which includes significant vacation time that most Americans can only dream of.
But, they’d be working fewer months and kids would have a better education if we got rid of all of this stupid days off and compress the year into five day weeks.
Compressing the year to make a longer summer will increase the problem of summer slide. The summer is long enough, though I don't disagree that the disruptions throughout the year are a problem.
Anonymous wrote:As a local government employee (not FCPS) I would beg to differ that $75k is not in line with other professions...I work 5/days a week and get federal holidays off- however any other time I have 15 days of PTO to use - in addition my job requires after hours work all the time...thats not "planned" or accounted for until the calendar comes out a month ahead of the meetings. While I would never say a teachers job is easy- I wouldn't quite say they are treated unfairly. Many teachers I know love summers off and it is a main driver for them- so to use that against the world is a little skewed.
I agree with this. I also work for local government and many people are working a full year schedule at this salary or lower salaries. Yes with masters degrees too.
Salary was never one of my main concerns. There were years in which I thought the raise/COLA (if it was even given) was insufficient, but for the most part I always felt the salary was decent.
Recently Retired Teacher
My whole career has been in non-profits and the COLA/raise is never sufficient to keep up with actual cost of living.
Anonymous wrote:As a local government employee (not FCPS) I would beg to differ that $75k is not in line with other professions...I work 5/days a week and get federal holidays off- however any other time I have 15 days of PTO to use - in addition my job requires after hours work all the time...thats not "planned" or accounted for until the calendar comes out a month ahead of the meetings. While I would never say a teachers job is easy- I wouldn't quite say they are treated unfairly. Many teachers I know love summers off and it is a main driver for them- so to use that against the world is a little skewed.
I agree with this. I also work for local government and many people are working a full year schedule at this salary or lower salaries. Yes with masters degrees too.
Salary was never one of my main concerns. There were years in which I thought the raise/COLA (if it was even given) was insufficient, but for the most part I always felt the salary was decent.
Recently Retired Teacher
My whole career has been in non-profits and the COLA/raise is never sufficient to keep up with actual cost of living.
Ok, and you realized that. Not sure what your point is here.
Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Teachers work 10 months max, which includes significant vacation time that most Americans can only dream of.
I sense a tinge of resentment in your post. If you want that, then step up and join me in the classroom. Please come stand with me side by side and do this work for $75K.
LOL, nope. Just tired of hearing teachers complain about low pay when they only work for about 80% of the year and get well over a month of paid vacation.
There is no paid vacation. I make 2/3 of what my my federal employee spouse makes and they have a bachelors and I have a masters + 30 additional graduate credits in education. I make less than half of my same-age peers in the private sector/government consultants make.
Why do you think level of education determines salary? A masters in education (plus 30 credits) is less lucrative than a B.Eng. or even certain associates degrees. Does this surprise you in some way/did you not look at this when selecting your degree?
Anonymous wrote:I didn't like the calendar this year at all.
Some of it was outside of the school's control. The snowcrete never-ending closure was an anomaly that frustrated me, but I can't really blame on FCPS. This was the second year in a row of pretty bad snow and the county has got to develop a better plan to clear it if snow is going to be a more regular occurrence in our region. The closures for special elections were also frustrating. I appreciated that they at least tried to combine them with TWs, but they just felt like one more thing on top of a bad situation.
Overall, though, there were entirely too many TWs/SPs. Do teachers really need 2.5 days at the end of every quarter? On top of that, as an elementary parent, we had these completely unjustified monthly half-days. I was annoyed last year when they introduced them to help teachers learn a last-minute new curriculum, but at least there was a reason for them. This year they just...decided to keep them for fun?
I really don't mind a few extra student holidays to allow minority religion families to celebrate some of their major holidays. Part of what I like about living in Fairfax is how diverse it is and I liked that the days off prompted my kid to ask why and learn a little bit about Yom Kippur and Ramadan and Diwali, in addition to Christmas and Easter. It doesn't cover every holiday, nor is that feasible, but I like the message that it sends. And since sometimes those holidays fall on weekends or over the summer, I would leave them alone. This year happened to fall a lot mid-week and was exacerbated by the other closures, but generally-speaking, if we reigned in the TWs and monthly half-days, I think the calendar could be a lot better without having to throw holidays under the bus.
Were there more TW/SP days though? Teachers have had 195 day contracts for years. 5 or 6 TW days fall before school starts and 1 or 2 fall after it ends. The rest fall somewhere in between.
I’d be ok with eliminating the early release days, but I think a TW should occur around the time 4th quarter grades are due (now).
ES Teacher
+1 I just took a personal day to write report cards so I could write comments and actually them and think about the kids and their work. I worked from 5:30am- 2:30 with a few breaks. I guess they don’t mind subs at the end of the year?
I don’t think people realize how long it takes to complete ES Progress Reports.
I have a ton of sympathy for teachers. I was a high school English teacher (writing). My mom and grandma plus one sister were elementary teachers, pre computers when everything was done manually, including creating your own lesson plans. It is a ton of work, especially grading well.
But... and I mean this very kindly... it often feels that teachers who post here don't realize how much every other worker, especially salaried professionals but also hourly career workers, work beyond their regular work hours, especially during busy seasons. Every vacation, every weekend, every weekend, my salaried spouse and other salaried workers work hours in the evening and weekends, take calls and meetings on vacation, and put in hours of unpaid overtime to meet pressing deadlines or to successfully push the team or appease clients during busy seasons or big deadlines. I put in far more overtime hours running my own business during busy season than I ever did grading papers or preparing report cards. Your work might be more valuable to society, but the volume of work is not unusually burdensome or voluminous.
This type of work expectation is not unique to teachers nor an extraordinary unusual ask. It is part and parcel of being a salaried profesdional worker.
Maybe? My spouse took a call this morning, did a little work, went to the gym took a shower, jumped on another call did some work, waited around for a while for work to be done and repackaged that work a little and sent it to the client. 6 hours of billable time today.
Me, I worked on comment from 5am-2 pm on my personal day off then worked on my end of year documentation for my SMART goal for a while. While I understand professional jobs have lots of things to do beyond their regular hours, but it is the main focus of your job. Your job is to appease clients and do those things. Our main job is to teach/watch the kids and all the stuff you do to appease clients is all added on to a job where we can’t just go out to lunch when we need a break. Our main job is to be in a room for 6 hours a day with kids teaching them. That is emotionally draining, and then on top of that we have a ton of admin tasks we can’t delegate to someone else on the team.
Why did you leave to run your own business? It wasn’t just the personal time, it is also that teaching is HARD on top of then having to lose personal time for admin tasks.
You still have a week of school left. Then you have several mandatory paid teacher work days to complete report cards in the school building at work.
If you are completing the grades 2 weekends early, and spending 9 hours on elementary grades picking numbers and canned comments from a drop down menu, 2 weeks before school ends, on your personal weekend instead of your required teacher work days, then something very wrong is happening with your time management.
DP
That’s not true. There is one TW after the school year ends. And for yet another time, if that teacher is working in an ES grade, the progress reports go home on the last day of school. Grades have to be entered a little over a week before the last day.
What were you doing on your 2 teacher work days last week?
It's not posdible that this person is a FCPS teacher.
Loudoun County perhaps? Private school?
There weren’t 2 teacher workdays last week - only 1. Monday (May 25) was Memorial Day. Tuesday (May 26) was the teacher workday and Eid was Wednesday (May 27). Eid was a religious holiday.
The vast majority of FCPS teachers are not muslim and were not celebrating Eid.
True, but Eid is an unpaid holiday (just like all the rest of the holidays, Winter Break, and Spring Break).
Monthly salaries remain the same even if there are holidays in those months. What do mean holidays are unpaid??
She means it isn’t one of the 195 contract days. But if you consider it as a salary you’re correct, monthly income is unimpacted.
PP - correct. People like to say that teacher salaries aren't that bad (for a job where most teachers have education beyond a masters degree), because they only work 9-10 months. While that is true, we have little control over time we must work and the more holidays and breaks are added, the more that 9-10 months looks like 11-12 and the salary doesn't quite add up when compared with other government employees (both county and federal).
Teachers work 10 months max, which includes significant vacation time that most Americans can only dream of.
But, they’d be working fewer months and kids would have a better education if we got rid of all of this stupid days off and compress the year into five day weeks.
Compressing the year to make a longer summer will increase the problem of summer slide. The summer is long enough, though I don't disagree that the disruptions throughout the year are a problem.
Unless we have a 190+ day school year (which is not going to happen; teachers won't go for it without a pay raise the county can't afford), there will be a 10-12 week summer or lots of days/weeks off throughout the year. Maybe a 10 week summer causes more summer learning loss than an 8 week summer, but I doubt the difference is large enough to make up for the disruption caused by having mostly 4-day weeks throughout the year.
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