Work Load Tyranny
I grew up with parents who were teachers. I remember well them working every night; marking, doing lesson prep. People were always talking about how teachers get such great holidays; I remember my mother spending hours a day through the holidays preparing lessons from the new textbook which inevitably would need to be rolled out. I grew up with a very strong and very real understanding of how a teachers’ workload was not just the day hours that everyone thinks are cushy, but far more.
My parents always told me not to be a teacher. Whatever you do, they would say, don’t become a teacher. I went my own way after high school, going into the creative arts (another field they would have preferred I didn’t go into but probably didn’t consider the need to warn me away from.) I agreed with them on one point, that I didn’t want to go into education. However, from the age of 18, this is exactly what I did. For 23 years I have worked part time or full time in education, in wide variety of fields and environments, but in education none the less. Perhaps it is in my blood, perhaps it was more environmental. Perhaps the urge to rebel caused me to unconsciously reject their admonition to never go into education. However it happened, it did, and here I am.
As it happens, I do really enjoy education, and am grateful for the opportunities I have had to work in this field. One thing that has remained constant, however, is the workload that I observed in my parents’ jobs the whole time I was growing up. I work in tertiary education, and they were in primary and secondary, but still, the same thing applies. It’s currently Friday night, 8:45pm, and I’ve finished working the week, but I still have hours of marking to do, as well as preparation and course design and reflection — more work than I could do if I continued working both weekend days full time.
Sigh.
The problem with this — well I guess there are several. One is that I never feel like I’m actually doing my job to the best of my ability. I’m constantly behind, and never preparing my classes the way I would like to. Which is detrimental to mental health. Another is that it’s exhausting and creates a terrible work life balance, which is not conducive to happy employees. But also, it’s incredibly detrimental to the students. With such a high workload, I don’t feel like I’m ever teaching the content as well as I could.
I don’t expect anything to come of this, because capitalism means that everyone in the system is constantly pushed to the edge of their capacity, squeezing every last drop of life out of them for the cause of profit. Such is the world we currently live in. I guess I’m just reflecting on something I see as a failure of this system. Especially when it comes to education. I guess as the saying goes, the system is never going to teach us what we need to dismantle it, and build something better.
Maybe we need a new kind of education system.
Sigh.
