How many hours a week do you work?

[itsallaboutthedollar]

Just this. How many hours a week do you work?

What do you do at home when you're "working" but not really? Do you get bored

Like a pp, I wfh, paid for 37hrs but really do about 20. I'm not bored at all! There's always something needs doing in the house, I have a lot of indoor hobbies, crafts and such like. On nice days I'll spend time in the garden. As long as my work mobiles nearby I can see if anyone needs me for something.

Contracted and paid 35, usually do 45, worst has been 70-80. Small charity, fraction of the staff needed. No overtime paid, I do it because I believe in it and the beneficiaries. I've not really touched my annual leave allowance this year either.

Sorry you don’t believe me. I have no reason to lie though. Im not even in the profession anymore. It was the undoing of my mental and physical health and I’m in a much better place now.

As I said, it depends on the school culture, stage of career and a few other things. I never said it was completely universal and I worked less in another teaching role - about 60 -70, sometimes 50-60 at quieter times. There are Facebook support groups full of thousands of people in my former position though. Do you disbelieve that many lawyers, investment bankers etc work upwards of 70 hours? Are they lying too? I think teachers are often perceived as moaning because they are usually coming from a defensive position of being disbelieved or attacked. Lots of people work unsustainable hours, sadly. It sucks for anyone.

I work at home, as much as I want. Can be 10 hr a day or 2. As long as I finish the work in time.

That’s just me though. I’m saying that as someone who often did work a week of 80 hours, with some fluctuation, I can definitely believe that someone is actually hitting those hours. Especially if they are very early in their career or have been given a lot of additional responsibility in a high-demand school and/or one with a toxic culture. When I was in teaching, I knew people arriving at 6am, people with a lot of additional responsibility getting up at 3am. A friend of mine absolutely worked the 80 hours they claimed - the admin on top of a full teaching timetable was like two jobs. Bonkers. I’m not saying it’s the case for every teacher in the land, but I absolutely know that it happens. The previous poster could be one of those unlucky souls.

@ScotchPine I'm sorry you've had a hard time with mental and physical health.

I find it interesting you place teachers in the same category as lawyers? I wouldn't be surprised to hear a lawyer working those sorts of hours, but then I don't hear lawyers complaining of being so exhausted at the end of a maximum 8-week term since their last holiday, or two weeks back into term after 6 weeks off either.

I find some teachers disingenuous and I don't hear any other profession moaning and complaining about hard they work as teachers, yet only teachers get the weeks of holiday. No wonder they are defensive.

None of this is personal, just my experience of teachers.

I mentioned them as an example of a profession with renowned long hours that are accepted, rather than questioned. The ones I know who work those hours certainly do moan, and rightly so. Those kinds of hours are unsustainable and detrimental to health - for any length of time. Would you question how demanding it is to work 12-hour shifts on an oil rig for weeks at a time because of the onshore/offshore shift pattern? In any case, the original post wasn’t about holidays, it was ‘how many hours do you work in a week?’ The question was answered accordingly.

As I said, teachers are often perceived as moaning because, unlike some other professions, they are disbelieved when they talk about their working hours. And other professions DO express how challenging they find their working conditions, going on strike for example. Also, the holidays often aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Two weeks abroad with young people being on duty 24 hours a day does not a relaxing holiday make! Half terms involve writing/marking/planning and, as I said, I had 250 exam papers to mark over Christmas. Admittedly, I still had a lot more holiday than a lot of people.

Not sure why you think teachers are being disingenuous. They aren’t just ‘moaning’ for the sake of it. What would be the point in that? Most of the time when they are talking about the problems of the job, it is with the desire to improve the system for the young people they are doing their best to serve. The excessive admin leaves less time to devote to the most important elements of the job. Exhausted, burnt out teachers can’t give their best and the teacher retention crisis is having a massively detrimental impact on schools and students. They also have the right to safeguard their own health and well-being

Why do you think record numbers of teachers are leaving? Especially if they ‘don’t work very hard at all’. They must have it made, surely.

@ScotchPine
Self-fulfilling prophecy - if enough people moan and winge about it you start to believe it. I think this is what is happening with teachers. They all believe it and leave to find the world outside of teaching to be just as, if not more, hard work.

Why would you be looking after young people 24 hours a day on holiday? Your children or others? If it's a school trip I wouldn't classify that as holiday for a teacher?

If you take MN as a cross section of society by a country mile the biggest group of moaners are teachers. Look at this thread and all the claims of wildly exaggerated hours they work. To use your analogy you don't hear oil rig workers moaning about how hard they work when on the rigs, they often say how good life is with the down time. You NEVER hear a teacher saying how lucky they are to have had six weeks off. Only yesterday there was a post moaning about how exhausted they were after two weeks back at work.

I rarely post on teacher threads as its frowned upon on MN and often deleted when a poster is not agreeing that teachers are so hard done by.

I don't think anyone in any profession should have to work long arduous hours. But I genuinely believe teachers don't, they just like moaning and justifying themselves.

Currently 18.5 but I’m upping my hours by an extra day in October so then I’ll be doing 25.9.

Envious of the low hours on this thread.

A good week for me is 50 hours. I can easily do 60-70.

PR/comms...it's a very demanding industry.

Do you mean officially, or actually? Actual probably about 45. Official 37.

You’re obviously determined to believe that 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’ve worked since leaving teaching. The jobs I’ve done have been stressful and hard at times for sure, but haven’t presented anywhere near the challenge to my mental and physical health. And the working hours have been incomparable. It’s also nice to book annual
leave as and when. So no, we don’t ‘all’ leave to find it just as hard or harder. No one else I know has either.

To answer your question. I said you are ‘on duty’ 24 hours when taking young people on trips. Not constantly watching them. Comforting homesick children, rounding up misbehaving kids in the middle of the night and ensuring they stay in their rooms, dealing with medical issues and other crises. Sometimes travelling through the night on flights or a coach. And yes, you’re right, it’s not a holiday for teachers. It comes out of their holidays though. And, re your point about teachers never acknowledging the positives of the holidays, I clearly said in a previous post that I had a lot more holidays than a lot of people. It certainly would have been a lot worse without them. I really don’t know what more to say about your claim that I’m lying about my former working hours apart from… I’m not. I have no reason to.

It is a shame, though, that you want to dismiss a profession in crisis as solely being down to people being a bunch of whingers and liars. Especially as you have no evidence, apart from ‘I just genuinely don’t believe teachers work hard’. At the end of the day, it’s also our children who are suffering because of the broken system.

Sorry OP and everyone for derailing this thread but I saw the usual disbelief that arises whenever a teacher says they are working hard and felt the need to give my perspective. Not that it seems to have made any difference. You can but try though.

@SeptemberSuns - there's a well-known Facebook group called Life After Teaching - Exit the Classroom and Thrive which currently has 134,000 teachers and teaching assistants on it. It has caught the attention of the mainstream media and the DfE, mainly because the recruitment and retention situation in this country is dire. A good proportion of folk on there want support/to get out of teaching or have left to join the "real world" and are generally thrilled with their new-found work life balance. The posts are harrowing to read at times and I really don't think all those people are "making it up".
Gaslighting isn't a good look.

What's the point of threads like this except to gather breadcrumbs for doxing. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful discussion initiated in the first post, it's just a straightforward "tell us this little fact about yourself". There's loads of these strange threads on the board lately. If you look back at people's posts you can gather a lot of insight into who they are, if you suspect you know someone on here it's getting really easy to verify it with all these odd little fact gathering posts.

I'm surprised so many people are participating to be honest. It seems to be a basic rule of online security not to give away too much. For example for one random poster I can see what specific job they do within the NHS, what area they're living in and when their kids were born. It's all a bit too much info for an 'anonymous' website.

Paid for 30. Prob do a bit more than that but not loads.

37, but more like 39-40. Local government finance. Endless work

@SeptemberSuns Out of interest, if teaching is so easy, why is it getting so difficult to recruit them?

34. Wish it was less. I'm 40 and I've been working full time since I was 19. Fed up! 26 years to go..

Can I also say anyone working over 40 hrs a week has my utmost respect. My house would be a tip and my mental health buggered!

35hr contract but often end up covering sickness etc.

24, over 2 long days and one short. I love being around for the kids when they need me.
I'll probably go to 30 hours when the youngest goes to secondary.

To those attacking me for my point of view, I did say its my personal view and I don't expect anyone to agree. I am certainly NOT gaslighting anyone!!! Quite the opposite I'm offering an alternative opinion to the gaslighting teachers seem to think the general public are dumb enough to fall for.

Officially 35, but usually an extra 10 hours across the week.
Now I’ve just counted, I’m going to look at ways to cut that down a bit.

I don’t think anyone is attacking you. When you accuse people, including individual posters, of lying, you can expect some pushback. People have just responded to you with reasoned arguments and evidence to refute your “people in many professions work hard, I just don’t think teachers do” statements. Especially because it’s a profession with a recruitment and retention crisis and thousands of people suffering mental and physical burnout. The things you have said are really damaging to those people, so they deserve to be challenged.

Disclaimer - I’ll say it again, teaching is of course not the only profession where working conditions are a serious issue. The internet is awash with accounts by lawyers, social workers, NHS staff and many more working unsustainably. All of those conversations need to be had.