By Tom
There are about seventeen hours from the time I say goodbye to my students until the time I say hello to them the next day. Of those seventeen hours, I like to spend about eight in bed. That leaves nine. It takes me about an hour a day to commute; dinner and breakfast combined take another hour, and I spend one more hour shaving, showering and performing other “miscellaneous hygienic tasks.”
That leaves me with six hours of free time. But not really; since one of those hours has to be spent at school, according to my contract, and another hour has to be spent at home, doing chores and staying on top of my kids’ homework.
So I really only have four hours of discretionary time each day. Four out of 24.
I could easily spend all of them on my students. I could spend an hour looking at student work, making comments and entering data into my gradebook. I could spend another hour planning the lessons for the next day. I could spend a third hour tweaking those lessons, differentiating them according to the needs I discovered while looking at student work. I could then spend an hour or so on the phone or with email, communicating with parents. And there are times when this is exactly how I spend those four hours.
I could just as easily spend all four of those hours pursuing other interests. I have a family that likes my company and my attention. I have a bike that I like to ride, a guitar that I like to play, a TV that I like to watch, and books that I like to read. And there are days when this is exactly how I spend those four hours.
The trick, of course, is to find a balance between the two. That’s the eternal struggle that starts when you get a job and a family and ends when you retire. Or die. And after 27 years, I’m at the point where I think I’ve got it just about balanced. But first, two caveats:
1. Whoever coined the phrase “less is more” was wrong. Less is not more. Less is less and more is more. The two are exact opposites, like hot and cold. You wouldn’t go around saying “hot is cold.” To do so would invite derision. The fact of the matter is, the more time I spend focused on the job of teaching, the more my students learn. The fourth hour might not be as productive or important as the first hour, but it would still produced measurable, positive results. It would be nice to think that working eight hours a day at the job of teaching would produce better results than working eleven hours. It would be nice, but it would also be wrong. Working eleven hours would produce better results than working eight hours. Sorry.
2. Whoever coined the phrase “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” was right. Most teachers, including myself, truly enjoy working. I enjoy looking at student work. I enjoy lesson planning, and I enjoy communicating with parents. If there was nothing else going on in my life, I could easily spend all four of those hours “working.”
There are, however, other things going on in my life. Therefore, I’ve decided to split the difference. I spend two of those hours on my job and the other two on myself and my family.
This means I spend about ten hours a day focused on teaching. Seven of those hours are with my students: teaching, remediating and eating lunch with them. I spend about an hour before school, locating and organizing materials. I spend about an hour after school, looking at student work and communicating with parents. I spend another hour in the evenings, planning lessons for the next day.
That’s it; ten hours a day, five days a week. And it seems to work, at least for right now.
And if that seems a little extreme, consider this: Since I only “get paid for” eight of those hours, I consider the other two a contribution to society. Volunteering, if you will. Which in my mind exempts me from volunteering in other areas. I turned down the opportunity to be president of the High School Music Booster Club. I was never a Boy Scout Pack Master. I don’t work for the March of Dimes.
And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.
How about you? How do you work out the balance between the demands on your time?
Jen, I appreciate that you remind those of us who are allowed to “leave work” at 3:00 that there is a whole other population of parents out there, who clock out after dinner. Thank you. Teachers are fortunate.
Mark, it’s taken me more than a decade to learn to be efficient as a teacher. At first, I left my classroom around 5:00pm. I got there around 6:00am. Heaven, really, to have so many kid-free hours to think about my performance.
Now that I’m older, busier – a mother and wife – I can’t do that. I do what you and Tom do – focus my writing objectives so that I can focus my grading. I hear a beloved colleague, who said once, “They need to write more than I need to comment,” and I let my students produce work that I don’t really examine. I am extremely careful in my diagnostics early in the year, so that we never do busy work but are always doing necessary work. I communicate with and rely on parents to help me educate the children in my care.
This year I’m teaching a group of kids who have well-educated parents. My life is pretty cushy.
More and more, I’m thinking that the teachers who teach children with under-resourced and under-educated parents should have fewer students, longer days, and bigger paychecks. In fact, I’m certain.
This is a fascinating discussion. I’m not a teacher, but I’m passionate about productivity and trying to find the most efficient ways to do things. The balance is tough as you say Tom because I could easily also spend unlimited time at my job(s) but I would be sacrificing time with my family. I’m not a teacher in title but whenever you manage people you are a teacher in spirit if you’re reasonably good at your role.
I watch little to no TV which saves me tons of time to apply elsewhere in my life. I read a lot.
I usually read in the field of time management, leadership and productivity because I’m searching for tips that I can apply to help with balancing my full-time job, website building and family. Family is the most important of course, but it’s like the chicken and the egg… you need to do an excellent job at work (especially lately to avoid layoffs) in order to take care of your family and meet basic necessities of life.
I’ve read about people structuring every, single hour of their day. I’ve read about “creatives” who can’t stand schedules and just about everything in between.
One discussion that sticks out in my mind regarding balance is from David J. Schwartz, Ph.D in his best-selling book, “The Magic of Thinking Big.”
It’s on page 185 and it’s about giving your family “planned attention.”
He describes a company vice president saying he brings a lot of work home with him by nature of his position but from 7:30 – 8:30 every night is devoted to his two kids.
He plays games, reads stories, draws, talks, whatever. Then he works from 8:30 -10:30 then spends an hour with his wife from 10:30 – 11:30 nightly.
He also reserves Sundays for only family days. He will do whatever the family wants to do together.
He said nothing interrupts this time, for any reason and this schedule allows him to spend the time he needs to on everything at work as well.
I know you’re thinking 5 hours a week with kids isn’t enough… but I work with people who literally get home after their kids are in bed and leave before or as they get up every day.
That story has stuck with me and I’ve tried to model that. Some weeks it works, some weeks it doesn’t, but only because I’m not as devoted to making it work yet.
Anyway, interesting discussion. Thanks.
I agree with you on writing. I used to go through each student’s paper and correct every mistake. It took hours, and the result was a mostly-red paper that sucked the fun out of writing. Now I focus on the big-picture – stuff like a beginning, middle and end – and try to turn over the editing to my students. As far as editing goes, my focus is on “is the spelling good enough for other people to read it?”
I have realized that me doing more in my four hours (I calculate out about the same) doesn’t always result in my students learning more. Maybe this is a difference in the nature of my students (high school), but I’ve realized for example that me spending excessive hours on grading homework does not always translate into improved student skills. Writing is the biggie. At the beginning of the year, I pour more than four hours per day into giving feedback on writing–training the students on my expectations. By this point in the year, though, I now expect them to be doing more work than I do on their writing. There is that diminishing returns concept for the amount of effort I put in as a teacher. I could spend five minutes per student paragraph or thirty minutes per student essay “editing” every syntax, spelling, and usage error… will these be fixed next time? Nope. Instead, I spend one minute per paragraph or ten minutes per essay identifying higher-order concerns and writing goals. The students then have to (on their next writing task) annotate where they have responded to my goals for them from the previous task in order to improve their own writing. Less work for me, but they end up actually learning, not just waiting for me to edit their writing…because for them to learn THEY have to do work.