Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Wish to have a discussion here as I often heard from my teacher friends that teachers should just teach, and not dealing with all the non-teaching work.
I feel it bewildering why teachers have this misconception that teachers shouldn't be dealing with admin/non-teaching work. Other professional roles like police, firefighters, lawyers, doctors, and engineers all have their fair share of non-core tasks, and I don't hear any of them complaining about the "extra" work.
It's even more absurd hearing some teachers complaining about taking a CCA.
Shouldn't teachers go into the teaching career knowing that they have to perform both the teaching and non-teaching tasks, and not expecting anything less?
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During the normal school term, teachers generally work about 60-70 hours a week. Work consists of teaching in a classroom (averaging 15-18 hours depending on subgrade), lesson planning & preparing resources (this takes up time), Remedial lessons (takes up about 3 hours a week), CCA (norm CCA time of about 3 hours a week - excludes CCA planning), marking (this takes up a lot of time for EL compo/humanities marking, but usually more than 5 hours a week), IP dept work that may involve preparing and editing level worksheets, organising level meetings, preparing level online lessons, organising sch events (e.g. EL, Maths, Humanities, MTL dept, etc), NON-IP dept work that may involve organising sch events or sch-based activities (e.g. CCE, ICT dept, etc) (event planning can take up A LOT of time), ALP/LLP/PD research work, parent engagement, nominating students for awards, updating student results, student remarks/student testimonials, occasional reflections on teaching, setting of exam papers, examining students for oral/marking of cohort-wide exams, classroom decorations, checking in with students on their well-being, other recess duties, etc.
I believe the complaining by teachers stems from the overwhelming amount of work that teachers need to do on a weekly basis. By the way, almost all teachers do work on weekends too...and I believe what I listed above is just what a normal teacher does. Middle managers (Level head, subject head, HOD) definitely do much more than what is listed above. Its true that teaching only accounts for 25%-30% of the work. The other 70% goes to the admin listed above and the list is non-exhaustive.
Hope this enlightens you and makes you better appreciate the amount of work that the teachers put in for the good of Singapore.