Teacher Math

When I received an e-mail stating that teachers work only “part-time” because of their “summers off,” I immediately chuckled and shook my head. How about we play a game I like to call Teacher Math?

First, I will take the average full-time work week of 40 hours and extend it through 50 weeks (two weeks for vacation). This gives me a total of 2000 hours if I worked the average full-time professional job.

Next, while I recognize that teachers are only paid for a certain number of hours, the job is impossible to do without putting in extra time. I estimate that I work an average of 60 hours a week for 40 weeks (12 weeks of summer break). This computes to 2400 hours.

This means that I work 400 more hours in 12 fewer weeks.

Now to be fair, I teach English which demands an inordinate number of grading and reading hours, but let’s say I only work 50 hours a week (for the sake of argument). This would put me at 2000 hours in 12 fewer weeks than my compatriots in the “real world.”

Those summers off sure seem like a just allowance of time to refocus and to prepare for the coming school year.

Sidenote:

If I give each of 150 students a thesis paper, I would need–at 15 minutes per paper–37.5 hours outside of class to score them. If I rush through those papers at 10 minutes a piece, I still need 25 hours outside of class. This does not include rewrites. Yikes!

Of course, this has forced me to do more in class with these papers to make the work more manageable.