To have underestimated how demanding teaching is

[Makingplansfornigel2]

I was naive to think I could do the planning and marking in my frees and go home on time, I absolutely can't.
And this is with me using already planned lessons from TES. Either that or I print a worksheet and then create activities based on that, but this takes no more than 5 mins. I learned from the PGCE days that it's really not worth spending hours making fancy glittery PowerPoints.
We can't mark work in class as it's a school where they don't want you to tick things, they want written feedback in every book, and haven't got time to do that in lessons.
In between this there's tidying classrooms, adding on merits/behaviour points, contacting parents etc. And just having a break.
Would love to hear from anyone who gets it all done in school hours or stays the bare minimum after school!

Get not Fet

I worked in a low marking but high attention teaching role (special school) and because family time was important to me, I did the machine working thing too.

I got to work at 7:30 and worked without stopping (after making a coffee) until the kids arrived at 9. I took no breaks at all, working through my break and lunch, and then stayed for an hour after the kids had gone.
Then Sunday afternoon was planning time.

BUT, had I been in a job that required marking, there's no way I could have fitted everything into that schedule. My DD was working with the same aged children in a mainstream primary, and had way more to do than I did.

I accept that I know nothing about secondary teaching, but in today's education world, during a primary teaching role entirely into a school day is impossible.

Look up active marking. You can reduce your marking by walking around the classroom and marking some work as you go, while talking to the individual students.

There are also lots of things you can do to alleviate the workload. Follow Teacher Toolkit and apply his brilliant advice. Good luck! I left after 17 years in secondary. It's a tough gig but it's doable if you get systems in place early on. Ask older colleagues about their systems too. Do you have a mentor?

You can only do that if it allowed by the school's marking policy.

This has to be a wind up?

Surely this is a wind up? You thought you'd be paid thousands of pounds a month for working 9-3:30 everyday?

I do find the obsession with excessive feedback pointless. Kids barely glance over what you’ve written, they get so much feedback that it’s just gravy to them. Some kids are barely taking in the lesson content let alone then spending time reflecting on their performance during the lesson.

My sympathies OP - I was very efficient when I was teaching and I used to leave very early every day but I would devote my frees (secondary school teacher) and Sunday late afternoon and evening to getting my planning and marking done. I would also be in very early (7:30) to plan the day and get anything else done that needed doing.

Don't be silly. No school bans us writing in kids' books while we're talking to them, as they're working, in order to help them. It's called good practice and it's a helpful technique.

That and 'using planned lessons from TES or printing off a worksheet and basing lessons on that' makes me very suspicious indeed. I can't think of any subject in secondary where you'd get away with that sort of 'planning and teaching' these days.

My DD is a Teacher, and lived with us in her first year - it was brutal. She worked at home, before going to school at 730am. She came home at 630pm, had dinner, and then worked until she went to bed. No social life and often in tears. This was with me doing her "life" stuff for her, like laundry and cooking. We both wondered how the hell anyone with a family could cope.

Having worked as a Trainer myself, for a large organisation, what I can't understand is why there are no core lessons to pull from? The whole content for every year, should be held on a database, so that Teachers do not have to create the content, year after year. That way it could be perfected and held to an accountable standard, and prep time would be minimal. This is the way we did it at my work. So, I may have written a lesson, but that would be taught by other trainers as well. Every single lesson that we needed to teach our new recruits, was sat there on a central database, accessible to all trainers. The content, the handouts, the powerpoints, the quizzes. At school my DD taught at, every lesson was written fresh every year, so even if you had P3 this year and P3 next year, you wrote the lessons twice. WHY? Literally thousands of Teachers are all preparing the same content across the country. It's such an inefficient use of time. Also, we are not making sure that all children receive the same standard of Education.

Anyway, she now works abroad and the difference is stark. They have time in school to do prep, she gets regular pay rises, bonuses and gifts, and when she gets home at 4pm there is no work to do.

@Sparklythings1 gosh that’s terrible. In my school there is usually one per class, sometimes two or three if there is someone with 1-1 support who are usually happy to pitch in with whole class, marking, displays etc

Here’s how I used to do it (I left teaching last year):

1. Active marking. Go round during the lesson and look at work, make a couple of comments, get the kids to write down the feedback and stamp with ‘verbal feedback given’ stamp. You should get everyone done during the lesson and then you don’t need to take the books in.
2. Avoid setting written homework. Many schools/teachers set written homework for the sake of it rather than it being useful. I used to mainly just set reading /research as part of flipped learning. No marking required!
3. When you do have to set written homework, create a numbered list of the most common feedback - because kids always make the same mistakes as each other - and simply write the relevant numbers from the list at the bottom, and circle any errors in the work itself for the kids to self correct. Give the kids the numbered feedback list to stick in their books and now you’ve got a quick and easy marking shorthand to use. Give 5 mins of lesson time to them reading over and self correcting when you hand back the work.
4. Don’t plan lessons involving card sorts or faffy games where you’ve got to cut things up and laminate or basically spend ages creating something that you’ll use once for 5 minutes. If the time it takes to plan something is longer than the time it will take to teach it, just don’t do it.
5. Share the load with other teachers - I’ll plan this week if you’ll plan next week etc - we used to do this a lot when we were teaching the same topic and while I would always tweak colleagues’ stuff for my class it was great to know I would have something to work from.
6. Mark, plan and respond to emails during lessons when children are getting on with quiet independent work. You don’t need to be wandering around the class. I don’t care what SLT say - why you need to be hovering about distracting pupils while they’re working so you can look busy, I don’t know.
7. Use every free period to its full potential. Don’t get drawn into gossip. Head down and blast through your work. Go somewhere quiet out of the staffroom if you have to.

In time it gets easier but the reality is there is more work to do than can be fitted into a day and you do have to accept that to a certain extent. But make life easier for yourself whenever you can. Multitask and always ask yourself ‘is this really necessary?’. Most of the time it isn’t, in my experience!

This is basically why I decided not to go into teaching.

I really think Government did to stop messing about with curriculums and have a proper wholescale look at education. It’s massively under-resourced, with extremely high expectations. Every health and social initiative gets thrown at schools.
They have much better trained teachers, shorter school days, minimal homework and better outcomes in Finland.

I remember when one of my school friends was an NQT, she was working at least 85 hours pw that first year, it was nuts but the demands on her and the other NQTs were huge, and I doubt they’ve reduced this last 20 years. At least next year you’ll be able to use this years lesson plans?

I taught in the 70's - 80's, even then, during my first couple of years, I would get into school at 7:30am and leave at 6pm to get everything done. I have friends who stayed in teaching and watched them bring work with them on weekends away and holidays. The marking schemes were sometimes bonkers and the amount of admin just crazy. I was glad I got out when I did, I don't know how people survive.

This ‘reinventing the wheel’ was always a huge bugbear. It’s perfectly easy to create a framework scheme, with clear LOs AND leave enough scope for individual teaching style /class and group needs -that’s the icing and it becomes instinctive after a few years. The framework is the time consuming bit.
IME, the problems arise when these schemes become ‘binding’ because SLT lack the faith in their teachers to step away from a rigid ‘script’ and use their professional judgement and knowledge of their kids. This has ‘nothing to do’ with prematurely promoted SLT and a reliance on cheap ECT’s in place of experienced /expensive teachers.

YABU if you honestly thought teaching was 9-3.30pm, otherwise this is a wind up post.
As others have said you need to view it as normal full time job ie 8-5pm with overtime etc. The first 2 years are the hardest and then it starts to get easier, but not much easier. Had you not researched all of this before chosing teaching as a career?

I loved my job when I started 40 years ago - when you could walk out the door at 3.30 with just your handbag, staff meetings were rare and CPD is unheard of. By the time I retired in the summer, I'd grown to hate it. So much time wasted on pointless stuff, reinventing the wheel and the deteriorating behaviour and support from parents.
Quite honestly i don't know why anyone would choose to go into teaching nowadays. We get very little public support - "Lazy teachers have done nothing for the past 2 years, only work from 9-3 and all those holidays blah blah blah.

@TortugaRumCakeQueen
i think Finland has that, the core lessons and all schools work at the same pace, so that a kid who moves from me school to another has no disadvantage.
I think we don’t do that as it would require a lot of work and organization centrally, rather than just every few years appointing someone to pisd about with the curriculum and making All Schools implement that individually with no extra resources.

You have to follow the school marking policy, and Ofsted will check and mark down if not.

If the marking policy is to take in an essay each week and mark it in a particular format then you can suggest jotting in kids’ books as you wander around all you like, it won’t reduce the marking workload.

The annual workload is skewed and is much greater during term time. The balance is 13 weeks annual leave. It's not or everyone but it gets easier once you've built up your resources and worked out how the systems work and where you need to focus your energy.

Sorry not rift but Just noted pp stating OFSTED coming in is adding to the pressure. Could someone tells me why inspectors coming in is a bad thing for teachers?

Surely if you're overworked, (and I completely get that you are) a lower OFSTED report would be better, as people would then understand what's going on.

It's something that baffles me in all public sector areas, ( I used to work in probation/social work) that if an inspection is due they bust a gut to ensure all files are up to date, and show they are coping. But that is painting a false picture if you're not actually coping.

If you're not coping, the inspection is surely the way to tell the government you're not coping and this first step to get them to do something about it (I know pigs don't actually fly but they might do one day and they definitely won't if people keep fighting for better inspection results).

I have always refused to follow any school marking policy that doesn't make sense to me.

Whole school marking policies are pointless. Every subject works in different ways and has different requirements. As I have said to every Head in every school I've worked in, asking an English teacher (my specialism) to mark 30 pieces of written work every week is not the same as asking a Maths teacher to mark 30 sets of sums every week. And before any Maths teachers come on talking about working out where they've gone wrong etc - yes I know it's not 'just' ticking - but it doesn't take anywhere near the amount of time as marking 30 essays. Any teacher with a brain knows this.

I have always done my own thing and I've never been sacked yet. If more teachers revolted against stupid blanket policies like this that do nothing to benefit students or teachers, then they wouldn't exist.

My attitude now is - there's a teacher shortage, good luck finding someone else as good as me if you want to start picking holes in what I'm doing. Good teachers need to know their worth and stand firm against idiotic SLT. There are plenty of jobs out there and it's a job seeker's market.

I have always refused to follow any school marking policy that doesn't make sense to me

And Ofsted wouldn’t give a shit that it didn’t make sense to you, they would only care that it wasn’t followed.

Schools care what Ofsted think and most schools would pick up in a book scrutiny that you’re a maverick and make sure you change your ways.

No point telling others to do stuff that they won’t get away with.

This isn't true.

There is no requirement for a school marking policy under Ofsted. This is a myth.

Schools do not need to provide any evidence of whole school marking policies.

I have this saved from when I was SLT - from an Ofsted document on marking -

Consistency across a department or a school is still important, but this can come from consistent high standards, rather than unvarying practice.

This quote demonstrates the very important distinction to be made between consistency of standard and consistency of approach, and more teachers need to be aware of this.

SLT who insist on blanket policies 'because Ofsted require it' are talking absolute bollocks.