Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
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?
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I think you may be looking at the relative complexity of the subject matter without considering the abilities of the audience (student). I would argue that teaching a 5 year old addition is as difficult as teaching a 15 year old trig. Having never done either, this is pure speculation. That said, I wouldn't call the majority of my wife's "prep" time mentally strenuous (lots of activity prep not report/assignment reading) but its a lot of time either way.
Ultimately though, i think teachers, at any level, could probably deliver the core curriculum by working within the provided time but I think in most cases that means they are welching on a lot of the core principles that drove them to want to teach in the first place and as a result they get drawn into working much longer hours trying to deliver there lessons in the best way they can and be of the best service to the kids.