Lockdown has made me realise I work too hard. Aibu to go pt? Any other teachers?

[0None0]

My working hours have been so much better teaching online from home.

Along the lines of 50 hours a week rather than 80. And that is before the commute is taken in to consideration.

I dont want to go back to 80

I’ve got used to this better work life balance now.

So I’m going down to a 50% timetable.

Are there any other teachers doing the same? Found how nice life is with fewer hours? Of course I’ll still be spending half my time on non teaching tasks.

I was intending to retire a year ago, but have stayed on to help see the kids through the pandemic. Which I am still doing, but will only by working 2.5 days a week next year

Things I do not do in lockdown or during remote learning

Break duty
Lunch duty
Setting up classroom
Tidying away classroom
Requisitions
Practice practicals
Set detentions
Run detentions
Change displays
Investigate bullying incidents
Lock up at night
Open up in the morning
Litter picking, or supervising litter picking
First aid
Looking for lost property
Tracing owners of found property
Refereeing sports
Issuing text books
Chasing library books
Assemblies
Checking cctv
Sharpening pencils
Counting equipment in and out
Disinfecting teachers desk
Logging out in one room and logging back in in another
Inspecting uniform and planners
Fielding parental phone calls
Supervising medication
Bodging together the blinds in my room
Rationing exercise books
Confiscating phones, and looking after confiscated phones and other valuables
Issuing merit and demerit points
Taking registers and chasing absences
General admin etc

Actually there is a lot more but I think you get the idea

Yep, I feel the same.

Lockdown allowed me to focus on the teaching and not all the other crap that goes with it.

Decided to move back to teaching in a college from Sept (no duties, detentions, cover lessons, morning tutor sessions etc etc) just classroom teaching.

If this doesn't restore some kind of work life balance, I will leave teaching altogether. Shame as it's a job I do love doing (the actual classroom bit) and I'm good at.

Forgot to say, I'm part time too. Only way to manage teaching.

How many weeks of the year are you working 12 hrs x seven days or 14 hrs x six days?

You regularly, routinely work for 14 hours straight on a Saturday? You start at 0700 and finish at 2100 every Saturday?

@MurrayTheDemonicTalkingSkull

As a teacher in Scotland I always feel so bad for colleagues in England. It sounds absolutely unmanageable. I hope part time gives you the work/life balance you’re looking for.

This!

I've been teaching 27 years. Worked 0.6 for 14 years and upped to 0.8 2 years ago. I do NOT do any work on my day off. The whole point of working p/t is to have a work-life balance. I do the main load of housework so my weekends are free-ish and read a book/ exercise. I'm not being paid to work, so I don't. I also don't mark that evening either. Bugger reducing your hours to then work at home for no pay.

I don’t understand why there’s so much unpaid work. I taught for eight years but got very bored. Did all the non contact stuff in work time. Very organised and rarely took stuff home. Changed profession because I didn’t have enough to do and wanted a new challenge.

Peer marking can be very easily abused. For math; literature and language; and sciences, at least one assignment per week should be teacher marked. Administrative duties should be cut to allow for this. Why not let prefects do many of these jobs to build character?

You do an average of 11.4 hours 7 days a week on a regular basis? Or if you have a weekend off, the rest of the week is 16hr days? That's 6am -10pm without a break.

I can appreciate that you do longer hours than you like, and probably unreasonably long hours, but I am not sure what is to be gained from exaggerating it.

@Babyboomtastic

You do an average of 11.4 hours 7 days a week on a regular basis? Or if you have a weekend off, the rest of the week is 16hr days? That's 6am -10pm without a break.

I can appreciate that you do longer hours than you like, and probably unreasonably long hours, but I am not sure what is to be gained from exaggerating it.

Well I’m on site 13 hours a day without any breaks, then easily another 15 hours a week at home, maybe 7-10 hours one weekend day, and the rest spread out.

There’s one day a week the site is open a bit longer, so I may be there 14 hours, that does not include parents evenings and open evenings, etc with might be much late

Lockdown has made me realise I’m not prepared to do it anymore

@Finfintytint

I don’t understand why there’s so much unpaid work. I taught for eight years but got very bored. Did all the non contact stuff in work time. Very organised and rarely took stuff home. Changed profession because I didn’t have enough to do and wanted a new challenge.

In teaching the workload can vary massively depending on school, year group, subject, whether you have a TA or not and teaching experience.

If the school you work in asks for reams of paper evidence for planning / data / SEND, onerous marking policy, multiple meetings a week then that precious time after school is easily lost.

@Babyboomtastic

You do an average of 11.4 hours 7 days a week on a regular basis? Or if you have a weekend off, the rest of the week is 16hr days? That's 6am -10pm without a break.

I can appreciate that you do longer hours than you like, and probably unreasonably long hours, but I am not sure what is to be gained from exaggerating it.

Exactly! And the post history suggests that many times a week there is enough free time in the 6 am to 10 pm workday to catch up on MN threads. I think most people work 80 hours a week if they include their personal internet time as work time.

I'm a teacher so am obviously very sympathetic op.

But IME the teachers complaining loudest about the workload are either very unlucky with their choice of school, very weak at managing their time or have no experience doing other jobs.

We are our own worst enemy. No wonder our genuine grievances are dismissed by many when there are complaints like this :

"Sorry, wasn't very clear. I meant rushing off at 4.30 to get my kids meaning I need to do extra work at home."

There aren't many jobs where you are allowed to rush off at 4:30 because you want to pick up your kids, and it's perfectly fine to finish your work later at home. In most jobs you'd be there until 6 and picking your kids up at 6:30 or whenever.

Like most jobs, there are long days and busy periods of the year, offset by other advantages.

@BritWifeInUSA this is EXACTLY what I’m saying. My school is closed and I’m teaching online, which bumps my hours right down to about 50 per week.

And I’m loving it.

It was the same throughout other lockdowns and school closures. And if you’ve looked at my posting history, you would KNOW my school is closed again

I’m not returning to full time and I have just yesterday told my school so. So I am part time or I am retiring

I do appreciate the flexibility of being able to go at 4:30pm.
But do bear in mind I am MN now but will be in school before 7:30am as we start early. So I've done a 9hr day when I leave at 4:30. And I may well have had little time to wee, get a drink, been on lunch duty etc.

So I take my kids to activities, feed them, etc. But then at 8pm I often need to settle down to another couple of hours work. So 11hr days really are the norm. Just a "split shift".

Try a different school. They aren't all this bad.

You are working an extreme amount of hours, even for teaching. Cut corners, stop doing things and become more efficient.

@forinborin

I doubt anyone is actually regularly working 80 hour weeks plus commute on top, teaching or not. This is 12 hours straight every day without weekends and breaks. Grads in investment banks - the ones who end up having heart attacks from exhaustion - do not work this kind of hours.

Academics are working that long. But covid made this worse as online teaching has been far more work. Unfortunately we don't get the salary of investment bankers!

"So I take my kids to activities, feed them, etc. But then at 8pm I often need to settle down to another couple of hours work. So 11hr days really are the norm. Just a "split shift"."

Yes I agree, 10 hour days here and certainly no time for a wee, a coffee or lunch. If I take my breaks, I'm working later. I'm not saying it's right but I don't think those hours are unique to teaching at all, beyond a certain salary bracket anyway, which is where we lose sympathy I suspect.

I’ve worked in many schools over the years. This one is much better than some. Teaching BTEC in one school, the workload meant working straight through the night once or twice a week for at least 3 months of the year. For all of us

Same here Guy. I’m leaving for work in a couple of mins (kettle just boiling so i can fill my thermos as staff room still being used as a classroom at the minute) and will arrive around 7am (our form time starts at 8am) and will leave about 4:30 to 5am to pick up my kid from the childminder.
4:30pm sounds early but that will already be 9hrs30-ish and the day still not completely done but people do tend to forget school staff often have a much earlier start that other jobs (pre-teaching, one shift that I did was 8am till 4pm and no extra work outside those hours and another job was 9am to 5:30 with no work continued)

I appreciate that some posters don’t like hearing what some teachers post but we do need to realise that not all teachers are the same: some work in ‘leafy’ and small private schools, some work in high pressured private schools, some work in easier to manage subjects than others (I should have trained to be a Business Studies teacher and only do A Level and have a very light timetable come summer ), some work in stressful primary schools and some don’t so much.
We need to hear those teachers struggling and saying they want to go part time, rather than bully them or claim they are lying.

I would never speak to anyone who is complaining about their job being difficult (and plenty in other jobs do) the way some posters speak to teachers on Mumsnet.

That Btec story is just ridiculous. Say no and mean it.

I'm a teacher and I work long hours at pinch points and have worked 70 hour weeks from Sept - Dec and again through the TAG process. But never longer. I draw a line and if its not done, its not done.

We don't help ourselves sometimes when we carry on working such bonkers hours. Something somewhere can give.

I hope you enjoy part time. Don't let the job become expanding foam and fill any time you have available.

@Hercisback

That Btec story is just ridiculous. Say no and mean it.

I'm a teacher and I work long hours at pinch points and have worked 70 hour weeks from Sept - Dec and again through the TAG process. But never longer. I draw a line and if its not done, its not done.

We don't help ourselves sometimes when we carry on working such bonkers hours. Something somewhere can give.

I hope you enjoy part time. Don't let the job become expanding foam and fill any time you have available.

It was crazy, and I can clearly see that now. It’s harder to see when you are on the middle of it though, sleep deprived, controlled, criticised and manipulated daily.

I’ve long thought that some teaching jobs resemble being trapped in an abusive relationship

On that incidence it was the suicide of a colleague that brought me to my senses

Your hours are ridiculous. I'm not a teacher but have worked in schools as support staff and I've never known a teacher to need to be on site 14 hours a day. Why would they? Also surely the role of support staff to do things like supervise medication, lost property etc. The school surely has an office.