Spouses of teachers: how do you find it?

[Siestapesta]

I am an ex teacher myself so fully understand the strain teachers are under and I am very understanding regarding the time required to mark and plan etc at home.

However, I have a newborn and a toddler at home and my DH is consumed in work,it is all he talks about and he comes home mentally drained every day. He looks exhausted to the point that I worry about his sleep more than mine! I am doing all get ups etc during the night as he needs all the energy he can get for work.

Also, during term time he's unable to engage with family life always seeming like he has more important things on his mind,he doesn't listen, always pre-occupied. Come the school holidays, he's a different man.

What are your experiences of having a spouse who is a teacher? How easily do they switch off in the evenings?

My OH is a Secondary Maths teacher. Her life is basically a mountain of work all year round apart from a few weeks in the summer. Its especially bad for the first term of the year and it gradually peters out until GCSE time.

It's difficult sometimes. From a purely selfish point of view I am the lower earner yet we can only take holidays in term time so I am unable to pay my share or have to lower expectations.

She went down to 4 days a week recently which makes things a bit better but she now uses the day off to catch up on paperwork.

I am the teacher and yes it is hard to switch off during term time. Holiday time is for catch up. There is so much pressure for more and more.

I am on maternity leave and lucky enough not to have to go back full time. But I would hate to have to go back to full time teaching with two little ones. I was feeling enough guilt with just the one.

My wife has been a teacher for three years having spent 5 years training.
Its the most ridiculous job in the world! I work half as much and get paid double. She is always shattered and mid week involved stumbling in, having tea, two hours of work then bed at 8.30. Weekend Saturday mostly off the work most of Sunday.
Half term will be two days at school then two or three days prep. at home.

Not the spouse of a teacher but am late 20s. Have quite a few friends who went into teaching. All but 2 have left. All pretty much walked straight into jobs with the same or better pay but less hours and way less stress. One retrained as a social worker (not exactly notoriously low stress!) and still says that it is much better (maybe just got lucky I don't know).

Has your DH considered leaving? If not, why not? What about going PT? I'm not sure there are any easier solutions.

Teaching is only suitable for people with no family and no life. It's a prison sentence.

My DW recently started teaching. It’s like she’s fallen into a parallel universe. Up before 6am, into work by 7am and comes home to work till midnight. Weekend working, too. No time to distress and very little time for anything else. I get it’s a stimulating job - when you’ve actually got time to teach, rather than continually assess, jump through countless ridiculous hoops and the children behave (rarely) - but right now it looks like a bag of shit. Probably selfish of me to say so, but I probably resent all the time it takes up (I’m not a teacher). We try to have date nights, do things together, but often too tired/all we talk about is teaching. Bleah.

My OH trained as a teacher. It was awful - I never saw him, he never slept, I spent every evening helping with marking, laminating or making worksheets just to help stop him from drowning.

It was miserable for both of us.

It’s for single people with its lots of energy.
Ridiculous workload, madly stressful.

My husband is a Secondary History/English teacher and I'm halfway through my pregnancy with our first. I was actually thinking about this the other day- how will it be when baby arrives?!

He has so much work to do it's insane. He gets to work at 7 am (I drop him off because he doesn't drive) and then he works through the evening (I help him mark sometimes), has a break on Friday evening and Saturday's and then Sunday's are planning/marking day again. I get super frustrated as the same as other people have said: he TALKS about work ALL THE TIME. He works ALL THE TIME.

He absolutely loves it though which is heartening to see, but I get fed up of it. There's no way he is ever going to give it up, but how will we deal with it all with a baby? We tend to do things equally in our relationship so when baby is here will I have to do all the feeds and everything? I must sound awful, but I'll refuse to just out of principle- work should not overspill into our private lives so much!

Vent over. Peace x

My DH is a teacher but I also work 3 days in a high pressure job and we have 3 dc. Both of us have times like the OP described but its not constant. Family comes before work for both of us.

VSwin, you are right. He will HAVE to take his foot of the gas when baby arrives. You may also find that with the very normal demands of family life, his job becomes more tiresome and less enjoyable.

Op are you me

DH is a secondary school senior leader.

I am basically left alone to do everything else while he is consumed by Work. He probably works from 6am-8pm every day plus weekends. It’s all he thinks about or talks about.

I'm not a teacher but I'm from a family of teachers. I've noticed that the workload and approach to work is very different. Some work late in the evenings and some don't work after 5. My brother and SIL are both teachers of the same subject in neighbouring schools. My brothers has very healthy work-life balance where as my sil is very tired all the time due to work. I think teaching is one of those professions where personality has a massive effect.

Same. OH works in education. I’m lonely. No joke.

I teach and see teachers all around me drowning in work, much of which is created by their own stupidity. For instance, they will spend two to three hours writing more or less the same comment in each book, or on each essay, rather than just giving feedback in a simpler, much more effective way.
Teaching is a great job.

I got out for a while but was unable to find a reasonably paid alternative. I work 0.4 but it's 20 hours just to do a passable job. I also do a lot of examining work which goes some way to justifying my part-time hours.

Based on the work load for two days with more than the bare minimum of non-contact time, I don't think I could do the job justice if I worked FT now. There is no slack whatsoever. Marking is just insanely detailed despite the rhetoric about cutting it down. I think increased transparency (meaning SLT wandering around at any time and books being spot-checked if you have to call for behavioural support) makes it impossible to cut any corners. I also think that some parents expect their child to be taught as if they're in independent school class sizes. One parent complained to my HOD when I hadn't responded to an email within 10 minutes recently.

I'm training for a specialised role but I'm going to have to wait a long time for a job as DH won't countenance moving but also won't do anything about increasing his own income, but that's a different story

Christian77, do you think they would be giving personalised feedback on every book of it wasn't what their SLT directed?

I'm married to a teacher and from this very limited sample of one the school makes an enormous difference. In his old school he worked long hours and at weekends and was constantly miserable. He moved schools a couple of years ago (to a super-selective, if anyone's wondering) and is home by 5.30 most days and does almost no work at home except in the holidays. He's also so, so much happier - it was like seeing him be reborn! His old school had very challenging behaviour which really wore him down - he got to the point where he was waking up with a stomach ache on days where he knew he had to have certain classes because they made him so anxious - but it was senior management which really made it unbearable. He was thinking of leaving the profession entirely before getting this job at his current school, but as I say it's just been a transformation.

Try being married to a corporate lawyer who works all hours including weekends, has clients calling at all hours (some because of time zones) and doesn't have school length holidays to recover!

You could of course insert any professional job whether it is doctor, accountant etc.

Teaching can be shit but no way are my kids being shortchanged for somebody else’s.

Why do people always want to get the school holiday digs in? So much jealousy of teachers' holidays, so few people putting their money where their mouth is and becoming teachers...

I am not digging at the holidays actually. I realise there is work to be done all year round but it is at a more leisurely pace when the holidays unlike other professionals who do not get these breaks.

What I will say though is that it's notable that when women do a job it's often seen as really compatible with family life and they're expected to make that work; when men do it it's just accepted that they couldn't possibly do it and pull their weight at home. I'm an academic and I see the same thing there - female academics end up working really odd hours so that they can still do the school run even if it means writing papers at midnight, male ones just insist that their job is too intense for them to possibly do anything at home.

Why would people want to go into teaching if it is so stressful and so poorly paid. Why don't teachers put their money where there mouth is and use their degrees to go into other professions is surely the obvious counter argument to that.

I am a solicitor myself by profession. I thought for a split second about doing my pgce when I had kids but then realised my friends who were in education always seemed stressed. If I wanted a stressful career I'd go back into law and earn decent money.

I was merely pointing out that teaching is not the only stressful profession.

The lawyers and doctors get paid a shitload more.