HRS,

As you now accept the 50-hours average, I will refrain from continuing my account of what teachers actually do with their time. However, it does not make sense to me that you compare a teacher’s average working hours with those of males with dependent children. After all, some teachers are single, while others are women. I have no idea where the 49-hour figure you quote comes from. The standard working week is 38 hours. Most who work more than this get paid overtime. Teachers do not. In fact, Victorian secondary teachers gave up overtime payments in 1982 to fund the employment of additional teachers in the system. When the Liberals were elected in 1992, they took away those teachers (and a few thousand more besides), but unsurprisingly they did not bring back the overtime payments.

Teachers are not really seeking “more” money, just some of the money they used to get. If able people who would once have been able to earn 67 per cent above the average after seven years by becoming teachers realise that they will end up earning only the average, they will join another profession, and both the ability and the independence of mind of those entering teaching will continue to decline. What you are endorsing is a long-term pay cut, followed by an offer to get back a small part of that cut by working some extra weeks. This makes no sense to me as it actually undermines the quality of those who will teach our children.

Teachers need their holidays because teaching is a highly stressful job. They already use some of their holidays to prepare for the following term.

Not everything a teacher does can be judged by marks. Nor do teachers have total control over students. Students may or may not pay attention. They may or may not do their classwork. They may or may not do their homework. They may or may not be in a class of motivated fellow-students. They may or may not be in a well-run school. These things are not in the teacher’s control.

Chris C,
The 49 hrs per week for a male with dependant children come from here.
http://melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/pdffiles/RDrago.pdf

Go to tables 5,6 and 7 at the bottom of the file, combine all the data and you get close to 49 hrs a week for men with dependant children, while women with dependant children are working less hours.

There are also tables for singles in the study.

So the avg type hours being worked by teachers is not much more than the avg hrs being worked by many other people in our society.

I think you will also find that many people’s wages or purchasing power have reduced in time, which is why many households now need at least 2 incomes to run the household. In the past only one income was often necessary.

Why all this has occurred is another topic, but the basic way to increase wages is to work longer hours or improve productivity.

If teachers don’t want to work longer hours or work in their holidays, then they have to increase their productivity. It is the same for everyone else.

Chris C, that is a cop-out. Yes, students may or may not do their homework, classwork, etc. but part of the teachers job is to motivate them and pique their interest. Not just cough up content. My high school english teacher, for example, was fed-up with her (NSW) general english classes attempts to understand the text, so engaged her related english class (next level up) to sit in on a lesson and play devils advocate - something that we took great delight in! It at least fired up a few people and no doubt got them better marks as a result. Its just innovative thinking. My physics teacher was also a timetabler, and often left his physics class in charge of his most capable student to teach itself, while he did his timetabling. Our behaviour was based on the threat of being demoted to biology (a GIRLS class! - yes I'm aware of the irony, but I was the only girl in my physics class).

Look, there are plenty of teacher that put in huge amounts of time and effort, but like most things, its the exceptions that really get up the nose of the general public. Those that brag they can teach a lesson "off the cuff..."

As for teaching being a high stress profession, it is certainly not one that I would choose, but there are plenty of other high-stress professions too, and they dont get the same time off, so please dont use that as an excuse.

HRS,

I am unable to access the document you referred to via the web address you gave me. I have gone to the main website, but I still cannot locate the document you refer to. There is a 2005 statistical report that gives the average working hours of 42.3 in the main job for men with more than one job, so this is not the one. If you give me the actual title of the document, I will look again and comment further.

Country Gal,

If you were a smoker and you went to the doctor who told you to give up smoking and you did not do so and then got cancer, would you blame the doctor? This is the analogous situation to teachers, whose power to enforce learning is very limited. That is a simple fact of life. There is a limit to what teachers, even clever and innovative ones, can do in the system that they do not control. Nor is there any reason to expect them to undertake extra hours of work in the light of the dramatic pay cuts they have suffered over the past 32 years. Nor is there any reason to think that large numbers of able people will come into teaching nowadays when they see how much teacher pay has fallen.

As a timetabler for ten years, I never handed my class over to a student so I could leave and work on the timetable. That would be a very dangerous thing for any teacher to do.

The highly stressful nature of teaching is not an “excuse” for the extra holidays, but a reason, in the same way that the stresses of their jobs are the reason that police, nurses and fire fighters get additional annual leave. Teaching is exhausting. I say that both from experience and from observation of colleagues.

It’s not the “exceptions” that get up the noses of the general public. Surveys show that most people actually have a high regard for teachers. There are just a few commentators who continually attack them, basically by repeating each other.

Chris C
The paper comes from the recent nationwide HILDA survey, and is titled “Family Structure, Usual and Preferred Working Hours, and Egalitarianism in Australia”

Part of the abstract is “Data from a representative survey of adult Australians are analysed for usual and preferred working time across family types.”

It seems that it is only available as a PDF file now, but you can get to it from here
http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000579/

If studying work hours, people of different age groups and family types can elect to work different hours. So this paper divides people into various groups, which I think is the best approach.

As the debate begins to taper off, and the issues I originally raised seem to be sliding off the radar, I am at least glad that I have helped promote vigorous debate about education issues.

In some ways debate about whether teacher’s work is harder/easier better paid/worse paid is irrelevant – we choose what we choose. Teachers chose to work these hours, and others chose not to be teachers despite the holidays? So what? What is the point of attacking either?

In the Sydney Sun-Herald this weekend was an account of person who gave up law to be a primary teacher. He is neither a fool nor a saint – he just chose what he was happy with.

Yes there are a few brilliant teachers, many ordinary teachers and a few poor teachers (some of whom DO get dismissed when they are particularly hopeless). Paying more or less will not change that. What needs to be done is to find ways to make ‘ordinary’ teachers good teachers, and as the Forum debates show, getting adults to change their beliefs is a slow process.

If anyone is interested in what I thought about funding Chaplains in schools or my critique of Kevin Donnelly’s attacks on schools you can check things out on http://demed.wordpress.com/ or contact me through the author details at the end of my article.

Ian Keese