@Crystalgirl90
7.30 to 7.30 is 12 hours, 5 1/2 of which are outside school hours. Sorry to all the hollow laughing teachers but it strikes me as pretty inefficient if you really are working all those extra unpaid hours.
If you don't work as a teacher, you have no idea what you are talking about. Absolutely no idea.
I get to work at 7.30 every morning, my class start at 8.30. My class go home at 3.30, I leave work at 6 after tidying the classroom, marking books, answering emails and meetings with adults in school about children's provision,
I go home at 6pm. I cook and eat tea and I am now sat doing school data on the laptop. This is most days.
As I say, if you don't work as a teacher - you have no idea.
The way I always try and explain this to people who are so stupid as to think that teachers swan in at 9am and swan out at 3pm and have all those lovely long holidays is that every hour in the classroom generates a minimum of one hour's work. While I am in the classroom with the children, I can't do anything other than teach them. So that is 'trapped time'. Rather like being in a meeting.
Imagine if you were in meetings that went back to back 9-4 every day (average secondary school hours). And each one of those meetings generated a minimum of an hour's worth of work.
So when are you going to do the work generated during those meetings?
Obviously after the children leave for the day.
Hence the hours we work.
I used to get two free periods a WEEK. I taught seven classes of 33 students. Most weeks I had 100+ essays to mark, as well as 23 lessons to plan and prepare for, a form to look after with all the associated admin, several meetings to attend as well as wider departmental activities - running a lunchtime club, organising trips, dealing with parent emails, discussing individual students and coming up with action plans with other teachers, etc etc etc.
Teaching is easily a 60 hour a week job. There literally aren't enough hours in the day for us to do our work because most of our days are spent with the children we teach.
I really struggle to understand how people don't understand this.
Being in the classroom with the children is marvellous. But eventually the workload becomes unmanageable - especially the marking. I taught English, so the marking was insane.
I loved many aspects of teaching and I don't regret having trained as a teacher. It certainly has made me a better person. But is it a family-friendly, work-life balance giving job? No. And I do think it is only right that we are honest about this to those thinking of entering the profession. Unless you work in a lovely little private school with small class sizes and teach a low marking subject like Art, you will find that you spend your evenings and weekends working. It is how it is. And it won't change until the government wakes up and realises that schools need more money for more teachers and much reduced class sizes.