Career as Teacher

Pray tell how the changes should be effected?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

The work week as defined by MOM is 44h long. Even though public servants are not protected by the employment act, the 44h serves as a good guideline on the amount of workload anyone in Singapore is expected to do.

OT by a few hours each week, if don't want to be calculative, still can close one eye.

When work way exceeds the limit, then it is not about being calculative. It is about standing up against exploitation. There are many who stay in school for 12h daily, and continue to work when they return home, and even work across the weekend. It is saddening to say that 80-90h week is not uncommon.

Basically 1 person doing 2 persons workload, while collecting 1 person's pay.
And the worst part is, after sacrificing health and personal time, the person get a C grade during appraisal, because the work done 'is not impactful enough'.

There is nothing wrong with doing what one is paid to do.

If someone is really not performing up to the expectations expected of their paygrade, by all means terminate them. However, most people are performing up to expectations. When the job descriptions were written, they were written with the legal 44h norm in mind, not with the perverse 'new normal' that many have grown too used to.

GEO5 is meant to be a normal classroom teacher. It is not a KP level paygrade, nor are GEO5s meant to be STs.

A normal teacher shouldn't be expected to lead or manage other duties outside of classroom teaching. Leading should be the responsibility of the management. They are appointed as the management for a reason.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Pray tell how the changes should be effected?

Expect 90 hrs of work, pay 90 hrs of work.

You take a GEO5 who is close to the ceiling (= probably slogged for many years) and figure out his hourly rate based on 90 hours of work. It's only $20 per hour and some of them have master's degrees, decades of experience, or juggle lots of mentoring and informal leadership work.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Pray tell how the changes should be effected?

Like how other companies, other jobs scope the workload?

Setting reasonable workload that can be completed within the confines of a 44h workweek?

If a teacher is expected to have 18h of lesson time, and if include FT time, assembly, and other contact time, easily 20h. Include CCA with 6h(twice a week), and staff meeting, level/subject meetings (around 4h). That's 30h so far.

Giving 1 pc of homework per week (super little, will get complaint from parents), multiply by 200 students across 5 classes, spending a minimum of 5 min per homework, that's another 16h at the very least.

Haven't include more time consuming stuff like marking essays, exam duties, setting papers, exam marking.

Just regular T&L alone will exceed the 44h work week.

There is literally no time for other stuff. And that's the expected jobscope of regular teachers.

The SEO-level management are offload from teaching and a lot of other duties so that they can do management work and to plan stuff and lead teams.

If nobody speak up, what is to stop them from expecting a 1000h work-week from staff to just earn a C grade? (A bit of an exaggeration, but the point is that workload is not being scoped correctly).

My point was more…. Who and how would these changes be made? Just talking here will lead us nowhere. Quite sure PS and Min (Ed) aren’t reading this…

Originally Posted by Unregistered

My point was more…. Who and how would these changes be made? Just talking here will lead us nowhere. Quite sure PS and Min (Ed) aren’t reading this…

I dare not think so far.

While in school, I had hope that people were listening. Now in HQ, I have lost all hope that anyone with big decision-making power has any ability at all to empathise with the ordinary teacher on the ground, haha. They are in fact constantly informed of the struggles, and feedback from the ground does actually reach them, just that they can't truly feel and empathise. No empathy = no real change.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

My point was more…. Who and how would these changes be made? Just talking here will lead us nowhere. Quite sure PS and Min (Ed) aren’t reading this…

Just be a HOT, just do the bare minimum as required for your paygrade.

Do tuition outside.

There is really no point in burning twice as much hours for a meagre few hundred dollar promotion.

Worse case scenario, leave service and do fulltime tuition.

Health and family are more important.

Teachers are not as highly paid as lawyers and doctors. Progression for farmers also fixed at the moment of joining. No matter how hard one works, the CEP won't change by that much. There's no partnership nor senior consultantship equivalent waiting for farmers, and no point for teachers to trade health and family time by working hideously long hours.

We can't change the system, but we can change ourselves.

And maybe when many things are not done, or enough work get not done, due to lack of manpower, maybe the people at the top will finally be motivated to address the issue to protect their own kpi.

Those who stay n slog r probably financially illiterate.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I dare not think so far.

While in school, I had hope that people were listening. Now in HQ, I have lost all hope that anyone with big decision-making power has any ability at all to empathise with the ordinary teacher on the ground, haha. They are in fact constantly informed of the struggles, and feedback from the ground does actually reach them, just that they can't truly feel and empathise. No empathy = no real change.

This sounds extremely scary. It's like a war where the soldiers are already dying, surrendering or even defecting, and yet they are still sent to their deaths. Younger ones unknowingly join in with persuasions of progression or prestige. Wouldn't it be a losing battle?

This means most individuals with power and authority up there are ignoring the battles and assuming they're winning?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

This sounds extremely scary. It's like a war where the soldiers are already dying, surrendering or even defecting, and yet they are still sent to their deaths. Younger ones unknowingly join in with persuasions of progression or prestige. Wouldn't it be a losing battle?

This means most individuals with power and authority up there are ignoring the battles and assuming they're winning?

You think they care?

There's always new young blood joining. They don't care if people leave. In fact, if you leave, even better. Free up places at the top.

A blind person who has never seen colour, will not know what they are missing.
A person will not know what they missed out if they have never experienced it.
The newbies who have been overworked since the day they joined, never knew how overworked they are. To them, working 90h week is 'normal'.
The old birds who have been around since the time when teaching is literally just teaching, know better.

For the senior management at HQ, feel free to look up their career history.
Mostly fall into 2 types. MOE OMS or PSC scholars. Both types have fast tracked careers, where they spend minimal time teaching. Some PSC scholars have never taught a single day in their life before. Some of the senior management are scholars who are rotated from other ministries.

Why care for welfare of the underlings, when they can squeeze the life out of them, extract maximum productivity, achieve their KPIs and move on to the next cushy role PSD has mapped out for them?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Expect 90 hrs of work, pay 90 hrs of work.

You take a GEO5 who is close to the ceiling (= probably slogged for many years) and figure out his hourly rate based on 90 hours of work. It's only $20 per hour and some of them have master's degrees, decades of experience, or juggle lots of mentoring and informal leadership work.

What's the monthly salary of a GEO5 who has reached ceiling?