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. This is the breakdown:
- Teaching in the classroom (about 32-40 periods depending on sub-grade) (16 to 20 hours a week)
- Lesson planning & preparing of additional resources to engage the students better (negligible)
- Remedial lessons (3 hours a week)
- CCA (supervise the students) (about 3 hours a week; this excludes CCA planning which includes RAMS, liaising with instructors & external vendors)
- Marking of students' work (negligible; takes up at least 5 hours a week and may be greater if we are talking about EL/MTL compo & humanities essays)
- Contact Time/Principal's Time (may be weekly or monthly depending on the school)
- IP Department work (e.g. EL/Math/Science/Humanities/MTL Department) which may involve planning and organising school events/activities, organising & preparing for level meetings, preparing & editing level worksheets, preparing level online lessons (now schools are hot on using ICT)
- Non-IP Department work (e.g. CCE/ICT/PD Department) which may involve planning and organising school/staff events/activities
- ALP/LLP/PD research work
- Engaging parents on students' progress in school
- Writing of reports/student remarks in the following events: nominating students for awards, student remarks for report book, student testimonials, discipline cases/school refusal/special needs (reports are required), referring students for counselling
- Updating student results
- Occasional reflections on teaching for PD purposes
- Courses to attend
- Setting of exam papers
- Examining students for oral/marking of cohort-wide exam papers
- Classroom decorations
- Checking-in with students on their well-being
The above is a non-exhaustive list. I believe the complaining by teachers stems from the overwhelming number of non-core tasks that teachers need to complete on a weekly basis. By the way, teachers do work on weekends too (even the most efficient ones). Middle managers (LH/SH/HOD) definitely do much more than what's listed above as they are doing more work on the school level and they definitely sacrifice a lot of sleep every week to complete their work. Therefore, it is true that teaching only accounts for 25-30% of the work for a teacher and the rest of the other 70-75% goes to what I have listed above.
Hope you are able to see the big picture now before you lament on this forum about why teachers are complaining about the amount of work that they are tasked to do.