Education’s Yossarian

Posted by In the"On Teaching" category 2 Comments

activities, and the list goes on. And schools typically grant teachers 5-10 hours per week to get all of this done.

That sound you hear is the collective, knowing and frustrated “Ha!” coming from all the teachers who just read the last sentence.

Marshall High School is at the generous end of the scale, but even 10 hours is not nearly enough. I found that, during a good week, I worked 40-50 hours outside of my class time.

And then I had to spend another 22 hours with my classes.

Do I get any sympathy for my anxiety attack now?

Most weeks I spent more than 70 hours on the job. Occasionally I put in more than 85. At first, I chalked this all up to my being a rookie teacher. But then I noticed that even veterans were working more than 60 hours most weeks. All part of the job, I was told. I knew what I was getting into, right?

Well, yes I guess I did know going in that teaching would be tough and mostly thankless, but I honestly thought I could handle it. I’ve had a lot of stress-filled jobs in my day: newspaper reporter, small business owner, radio news director, grad student. But none drained me like my six months at Marshall.

I chuckled one day when a student yelled out in the middle of a film I was showing about Joseph Stalin. “Oh my God! He made people work 60 hours a week! No wonder they hated him!” (My training in education, by the way, tells me that it’s ineffective to just show films to classes without designing some sort of accompanying activity. But I didn’t have time for the latter.)

My anxiety attack came at about 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, after I had already spent more than 30 hours that week on school work. I finished grading one stack of papers that I’d had for almost two weeks and simply had to return to students the next day, and, as I was about to tear into the next pile, I looked at my to-do list. I was supposed to have called three parents earlier in the day. I was supposed to have replied to a touchy e-mail from a counselor about a student’s grades. I was supposed to have begun making preparations for a field trip that I’d promised my journalism students. I was supposed to have typed the rules for a fun contest I had wanted my English students to have begun already.