Teaching and labour: it’s all in the details
Money and class size only scratch the surface of issues faced by high school teachers today
The rotating teachers’ strikes continue, and as usual the government is accusing the teachers of wanting more money while the teachers insist that their main interest is protecting the integrity of our education system. The teachers’ unions are loath to come out and say that yes, they want more than a one per cent pay raise, because they’ve all gotten the memo (and gotten it ... and gotten it ... and gotten it ...) about public sentiment that teachers get paid too much. (I’ve already written two columns on this ... spoiler alert: teachers don’t get paid too much.)
My question is this: why on earth would a person want to make less every year? Because if you don’t get a raise that keeps up with inflation (almost always two per cent), you’re making less money as you gain more experience in your job. That makes no sense. And yet public dialogue about teachers’ contract negotiations is typically guided by the notion that it’s unseemly for teachers to admit that not making less money every year is, well, important.
I wonder sometimes if people feel that, with the advent of more technology in the classroom, teaching has become more efficient and therefore less work, and this somehow offsets the increased class sizes being pushed by the Ford government. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m old enough to remember the days when all my students submitted their work on paper. I used to carry home great piles of essays to mark; now I carry a laptop. Online submissions and grading have long been the case at post-secondary institutions, but have also recently become the norm at high school, where all the students have iPads and submit electronic files to be graded.
From a labour point of view, marking online takes a lot longer than marking on paper. Imagine I have finished marking an essay on paper: I reach for the pile in front of me and pull the next one off the pile and onto the table in front of me. Done. It takes one second. I’ve timed it.
Now imagine I’ve finished marking an essay online: I click for the next essay, and wait. I click on the next student in the list, and wait. I click on the name of the assignment they’ve submitted, and wait. If I’m working on a Chromebook, I then have to click and wait three more times to download the file. Even on high-speed broadband, it takes me between 80 and 90 seconds to get from one essay to the next. I’ve timed it. A lot. And the city’s high school teachers use the same online learning platform as I do.
Some math: if I’m a high school teacher with 84 students per semester, and I only ask them to hand in one assignment per week for 17 weeks (the semester is actually 18 weeks, but this is a highly scientific, highly fancy factual analysis I’m conducting here so I’m accounting for real life rather than perfection), my workload has just increased by 33.7 hours over the course of that semester JUST because the marking has moved online.
Almost a full working week has just been added to my life by virtue of having to click and wait.
On top of this, the high school teacher’s job has become more challenging because the same amount of curriculum must be covered even though class time now has to be spent on kids who’ve lost or forgotten their iPads or charging cords, need to charge but can’t find an available plug, or need help sorting out an ever-expanding range of tech issues as they attempt to download, upload, follow, submit, join, chat, post and so on. Oh, and this is while teachers are also supposed to be making sure that students are on their individual screens for the right, curriculum-based reasons.
And does it bear mentioning that now, when emails — the ease of sending which only encourages their frequency — have been thoroughly woven into parentteacher communications, there are more messages to read and answer? And then there are the ever-increasing numbers of students with special accommodations for the types of conditions we didn’t even recognize a generation ago — conditions for which teachers are now meant to make time, space and understanding on a daily basis.
These kinds of details — the everyday things the general public might not know about — are critical to public discourse around labour issues in teaching today. Money and class size only scratch the surface.
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communication; her work has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for 25 years. Her novel, “Pieces of Work,” is available on Amazon.ca, and she blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.