No wonder teachers are tired!

An excellent English teacher I know is studying hard to become a librarian. Why? She wants a life.

    I can definitely relate. During my last year of teaching at a junior high, I did the following depressing calculation:

   I taught six classes a day, with an average of 28 students in each class. That was 168 students to supervise, keep records on, keep parents informed about, etc. If I gave each class one, only one, assignment each week and 75% of the kids actually turned it in, that was 126 papers to grade. If it took me two minutes to grade each paper, that's 4.2 hours of grading.

     Of course, I often had more than one assignment to grade each week, but let's ignore that for the moment. Every student also generally had some kind of composition, essay, or report to turn in. Using the same 75% rate and five minutes per paper for grading, that's 10.5 hours for grading writing assignments, if they were rather short ones.

     We're now up to 14.7 hours of grading for a week—in other words, an extra 1.83 days. That's in addition to the time actually spent in class teaching. Add to that the time spent planning lessons, writing tests, helping students after school, nudging the kids who had not turned in their work, and what do you have?

     You have an understanding of why my friend wants to become a librarian.