To feel like three days is the worst of all worlds?

[Letstrytogetwarm]

I know a lot of people would love this but hear me out.

I am currently on maternity leave and not due back till June but feeling a bit despondent about my three days.

My salary is obviously part time. As the part time worker at home I feel like the children, housework, cooking and so on fall largely on me. DH is good. He does do his share but in all truth and honesty isn’t around much. In fairness this is also true even if I was to work full time so I guess that’s personal to me / us.

But at work three days is sort of the tipping point to being treated as full time in terms of level of responsibility and expectations. Yet I can’t really progress in my career either (in fairness don’t really want to!)

I know lots of people love it but I just - don’t really. Wondered if anyone else is similar.

I have a friend who is a teacher and works 3 days but has her children in nursery for 4 - on the extra day, she blitzes her paperwork and marking etc and gets a bit of time to herself - would that work for you?

I wouldn’t mind that in the long run but right now with children so young it’s hard.

Pension is a point. I went part time at 41 so hopefully have a good few years of contributions. I also have a property which is let out.

Yep, unless you're an expert delegator it's a lot. I know a couple of people that do 2 days a week and that works quite well for them.

I’d love it but would feel mean! I’m looking forward to them both being in school though - might actually get some crap done! 😂

My friend thinks about it this way - she has plenty of work to do on that day so it's not really any different to using nursery on the other days.

You could also look at a half day if that would make you feel better about it

It gets easier once they are in school. I think it's worth the work having your own children 2 days a week - they won't get as tired from childcare & will have school holidays with you.

I don't think it's possible to say to person who has 1 in 4 lessons to do reports or parents evening though. It just doesn't work like that. But I agree it's a bad deal.

I know everyone gets worked up about teacher holidays but term time it's really not a family friendly job. I remember rushing mine to bed at that age so I could get on with marking or prep. There was no way I would have had time to lie down with them while they dropped off to sleep. Luckily they both got into a routine early on & would go to sleep easily once they got into bed.

I think that was the most tiring time for me. So hang in there.

I know what you mean.

I also work (slightly over) 3 days but spread it out over 4 days (one long, 3 shorter) so that I can do drop offs at school/nursery and pick ups at school.

As soon as I finish on my shorter days the 2 year old is already there (having been collected by partner on his lunch break) then it's not long until pick up at school. I don't work on one weekday but the youngest is at home with me then.

I find that I can't do any proper housework as the 2 year old there then 6 year old back, and because I'm part-time all the kid stuff falls to me inc night wakes every night.

People constantly forget in work that I'm there only 60% of the time and I do feel like I'm spending time catching up as another pp said.

I feel like I'm just treading water in workuntil youngest is at school. It's exhausting.

I'm so lucky in that my work is mainly wfh and so flexible so I'm going to try to move around hours/days to see if it helps but I feel so bloody exhausted atm.

I found 22.5 hours was nice but 30 hours basically full time with less pay. Going from 30 to 37.5 - 37.5 was easier as we had childcare sorted and a shared plan at home rather than me running everywhere.

I don't think it's possible to say to person who has 1 in 4 lessons to do reports or parents evening though. It just doesn't work like that. But I agree it's a bad deal.

It doesn't need to be parents evening or reports but the person should be doing 25% of the outside class stuff. In every school I've worked at, this is expected and the teachers would agree together at the start of the year. OP needs to be proactive and have these conversations. It won't change everything but I will help a little.

I'm guessing you have two under school age, in which case you really are in the trenches of parenting, working and trying to keep afloat. I promise it does get easier.

I am not a teacher but I work 3 days as a marketing manager for a charity.

What I found is:

• they hired something part-time simply because they wanted to pay a lower salary but they still expect me to manage marketing on my own for the whole organisation, so the workload itself is realistically full time (especially as I am expected to do additional duties that were not in my JD...)
• I am treated less well than the rest of the team: no training offered, no promotion and I know that full time team members have been given higher pay rises

I have had very similar experiences working 3 days in other charities over the year so I am looking for a new job as I am tired to be making crap money to deliver a full time workload on part time pay and to be overlooked all the time for career development.

@MultiplaLight you’re assuming there is a person to have that conversation with.

If I ever have a class once a week and someone else has then three times it wouldn’t occur to me to do reports etc. Half the time you don’t even know who they all are.

I have an office job. 3 days a week worked well at home, although DH didn’t do as much as he should have, but found it terrible at work, including experiencing direct and indirect discrimination. increased to 0.8fte and then FT much sooner than was ideal when DC were small in order to get a much better job. Have stayed full time and overall much prefer it.

Think there are particular, additional challenges with PT (or FT!) teaching. Used to discuss it with a friend who’s a teacher who worked 0.6 and worked a lot of unpaid overtime: I was horrified, she said it was expected / proportionate for her fte.

I'm not being facecious but it's awful planning and teaching if you don't know the other teacher. What an awful example of part time teaching your school is promoting. The caveat is if long term supply is being used.

I genuinely cannot contemplate teaching a group 1/4 lessons and never talking to the other teacher.

When, though? I’m not being facetious either but if I have five classes and share them all, when am I going to talk to the other teacher (if there is one!) in my three days a week?

PPA, email, break, lunch. I'm genuinely shocked. Who teaches what?!

My teens have lots of split teacher classes, though most seem to be split down the middle with each teacher taking same amount of lessons. Maths each teacher does a different topic and sets their own work. History they seem to lesson plan together and set joint homework and take turns marking. Science they each take a topic. So different subjects work in different ways depending on teachers.
But perhaps they don't do full days as such but say come in half a day to do their classes and leave

PPA - very unlikely to have the same PPA times. And I only have two non contacts a week.

Email - yes.

Break and lunch aren’t always the same.

Usually when there’s a 3-1 split on does the curriculum and the fourth lesson is a reading / writing lesson.

Opposite core subject to you so we have to make sure we plan/deliver in the right order for prerequisite skills.

I do think you've got the rough end of the deal if the other person isn't doing their 25%. In maths this just doesn't happen.

Most employers are very unimaginative about what management responsibilities can be done in three days or even less.

My old CEO was on three days, and as he said, he was paid to provide executive direction, and could be called "if the press were at the door" on his non-working days. And you shouldn't need executive direction daily.