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Originally Posted by Flash Walken
All this commentary from people who aren't teachers.
Spend a week in a school.
However, it is heartening to see that peter12 is in favour of increasing the education budget in the province. I was surprised to see that.
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Right, I'm not a teacher, but my wife was. She bailed when it was apparent that I was working way less than her and making way more money. So I definitely have sympathy for teachers and their plight. Its just hard for me to see what teachers are doing in elementary in particular because my wife taught higher grades where there was prep, extra-curricular activities and marking. She worked like a slave.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TurdFerguson
I don't know if my wife is in the majority or minority but before going on mat-leave she was working 70 hour weeks as a grade 1/2 teacher. The amount of time she spends/spent researching and planning lessons that would be interesting and engaging for her grade 1/2 was crazy, not to mention the hundreds of dollars that she spends monthly at the dollar store making up for funding shortcomings - i kid you not, its a budgetary item in our household.
Counting only instructional time as working time probably isn't fair for most teachers, although I'm sure some work bell-to-bell. To me, that would be like saying that only your client facing time (meetings) was work. I'm sure there is a lot more that goes into your job then just what your client sees.
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The budgetary stuff drove me crazy when my wife taught as well. We'd spend a significant amount of money on all kinds of things that almost anyone would agree should be provided.
I know that I'm not going to come across as I mean this, but I find it hard to believe that there is a ton of prep-work for elementary school, particularly in those early years (early years of school, not early years of teaching where they have to design everything from scratch and its clearly very time consuming and demanding). I get that there is time and energy spent for some planning and organization, but teachers have time during the day for that in some prep periods, and then realistically, an hour or two a day should make that doable. I do agree that for higher grade levels its much more difficult and onerous, but honestly speaking, how much prep time can there be for having kids do simple addition math worksheets or simple reading/writing exercises?