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?
Reply:
During the normal school term, a typical
MOE teacher works about 60-70 hours on average. This is the breakdown of work an
MOE teacher does on a weekly basis:
- Teaching in the classroom which may include relief periods and recess duties (about 30-36 periods a week) (15-18 hours)
- Weekly lesson planning and preparing additional resources/activities to better engage students
- Remedial lessons (about 2-3 hours a week)
- CCA (about 2-3 hours a week) + CCA planning (planning CCA schedule/activities, liaising with instructors and vendors, RAMS, allocation of tasks, etc.)
- Contact Time/Level Meetings/Committee Meetings (can be weekly or monthly, depending on school)
- Marking of students' work and assignments (at least 6 hours a week, and the amount of time spent on marking per week is higher for EL/MTL compositions & humanities essays)
- IP Department work (e.g. EL/Math/MTL/Science/Humanities Department) which typically includes organizing school events or activities, creating or editing level worksheets, organising and/or preparing for level meetings, preparing level online lessons (now, schools are very hot on using ICT in the classroom)
- Non-IP Department work (e.g. PD/ICT/CCE/SWC Department) which typically includes organizing staff/school events or activities (typically at least one big event per officer every term)
- ALP/LLP/PD research work/Prepare students for Competitions
- Writing of reports for the following: discipline cases, student testimonials, student remarks for report book, referral for counselling cases, referral for special needs cases, nominating students for various awards
- Parent Engagement on a monthly basis, which includes Parent-Teacher Dialogue Session
- Occasional self-reflections on teaching made mandatory by the school
- Assessment-related matters: Setting and vetting of exam papers, examining/timekeeping students for EL/MTL Oral, Marking of cohort-wide exams
- Classroom Decorations
- Checking-in on students' well-being
- Going on courses during term time for Professional Development & to improve teaching and learning in the classroom
This list is non-exhaustive. There are many more mini tasks that a teacher is required to do, but I believe I have listed the main ones. Middle managers like LH/SH/HOD would have a higher workload due to their job scope... their work is scoped to have a greater impact on the school level. From what I see in my school, they typically sleep less than 5 hours a day from week to week as they need to balance between heavy workload and family commitments. I sincerely believe that many teachers do work on weekends too. As mentioned previously, teaching only accounts for 25-30% of the workload of a teacher. The other 70-75% goes towards the admin that is listed above.
Hope this will enlighten you that your teacher friends are lamenting only because they are overwhelmed by the amount of work that they are required to complete on a daily basis. Many teachers joined teaching believing that being a teacher is mostly about teaching in the classroom... only to be overwhelmed by the heavy administrative load that is exhausting and never-ending. If only the calculative parents and the public could understand and have more empathy for what teachers are going through on a daily basis.