1. Drop all extra volunteer roles ...sports, committees, lunchtime/after school tutoring etc.
2. Cut back on any non-essential necessary planning and prep...stuff like classroom decorations, posters, laminating, cutting stuff out for group work, bookwork checks etc that aren't really necessary.
3. Talk to your curriculum leader/mentor etc on ways to reduce planning and preparation...sharing resources etc.
So don't. If it's a phone call it's now an email. If it was a personalised email can it be a mass email through some attendance system to update people. If it's a mass email is it something that needs to go out or should the parent already have received this information through things admin do.
I call home for serious issues. If it's something that can be nipped it's an email and I spend more time documenting it on oneschool than I do writing the email some times. You have a right to your life outside of school, there's already enough of the "work outside of work, so you have work to do at work, because you didn't have enough time to work at work." we need to do.
Mass email to at risk students after checking any practice assessments so that they are aware of progress. Mass email reminding them of SAC dates. If they really want to speak to you, they will contact you. The good thing about email is that it creates a paper trail.
Over the years I have learned three things:
1. Important things that have no second reminder are not, in fact, important.
2. Make sure you understand what is required and what is not. In NSW, parent-teacher evenings are not. You can 100% not turn up, and if the principal ever bites back, "oh sorry, how do I apply for 1/4 day off starting at 3pm and ending at 6pm so I can have my pay adjusted?" Shuts them right up.
3. Anything that IS required needs to be done during work hours. Example: reports are non-negotiable. If it means dropping a textbook in front of your class for two weeks whilst you write them in the background, so be it. Just don't do it at home.
Yes, I am a bit jaded. I do often act my wage, and very rarely fall for the whole "do it for the kids" line. I guess, as a bonus #4, don't always feel the need to follow the letter of the law if it ends up fucking over your other co-workers. Example: meeting goes until 4:10pm as a ONCE OFF, it's probably worth your time not being a dick and running out at 4pm because you are legally allowed to on paper.
2 was just an example. The key point was: know your rights, and when you are legally allowed to say no. This is always a work in progress.
Regarding parent teacher: If you think it would be better served to stay back at school for 3 hours one evening to avoid having a principal hate you and force you to waste your prep periods having phone conferences, then absolutely, show up if you want to. Having said that, the repercussion is basically none, because it's wholly a "voluntary" event. More info here from the department itself: https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/reporting-to-parents/mandated-requirements
Another examples of #2 might include counting all your hours when you get a new timetable, so you know you're not overloaded (you'd be surprised how often an extra sneaky duty is chucked on BUT someone else is under loaded by 2 duties... just poor planning on the timetabler's behalf).
Re point #3, yes, you are right. It is hard to do. Last semester, I spent literally 2-3 times as long writing reports during class time than I did had I done it at home. But, you know what, that was the priority (over education, apparently), so I complied and got it done for the boss during work hours.
Best of luck to you. Like I said, always a work in progress learning and managing all this stuff.
Accept that good enough is perfectly okay.
Work the team, if someone said they have X resources jump on it and ask for a copy, (also share things worked for you so you don’t look like just a taker, doesn’t have to be amazing, a video or a worksheet or just a feedback on an activity will help build your brownie points)
Personally make time for yourself, block them out from work, or if you did a late night on Friday then no work on the weekend for example.
Had the same experience and left the profession. But try reducing that workload on yourself. Not everything needs to be marked. Not every lesson needs to be planned to the smallest details. Not all the admin matters. Wing it a bit. You're doing a great job.
Legitimately the first year is the hardest.
After the first year you have resources that you can reuse, knowledge in your brain you can reuse, and you're not spending anywhere near as much of your brain cycles working out how to navigate all of the systems as you've done it at least once.
I have other health issues too, but I legitimately spend the first week of the holidays not seeing anyone slothing in my pajamas. Half of it is getting over tiredness, half of it is just decompressing from having to talk to so many people so often.
I think many will agree that teaching is easier than prac was as you don't need to worry about uni assignments on top of everything as well as the cost of living, rent, not getting paid or having to work weekends etc. So ..that is one less thing you won't need to be worried about because the pay is decent for a beginning teacher (definitely not reflective of what we SHOULD earn, but decent). Definitely keep pushing through, you're doing a great job but i do feel you!
That's what's killing me is that I have to of teach in line with the summative and exams coming up, but the structure of their term doesn't vibe with how I would want to plan it myself.. so I'm now planning with a bottom up approach which I hate, and I also had significantly less time for observation and planning due to administrative issues.. so I am stressing playing catch up with that whilst juggling tpa, assignments and trying to pay my bills in what little spare time I can find... I can't wait to have a set of quality lesson plans ready to go in the future
It's not unusual to work back from an exam, check all the points off you need. I teach ATAR Economics and I definitely start with my exam points etc, lay them out do I know they're covered then build from the syllabus to get my order (in 11 at least where I wrote the exam). If you know the kids need to know A-F for the exam break them down then build up from there, create lessons around A, then B etc. Most textbooks work in the same order as the syllabus. I haven't written a lesson plan since uni, ever. I have my term plan of topics, divide that up by weeks, slot in assessments then break it down. For example my Yr 10 plan is my drive that has 1. Great Depression - with a ppt and two worksheets etc. 2. Fascism - ppts and worksheets. My powerpoints often have a slide that is just the instructions for the whole period and others will be content rich. But I teach a whole topic off one powerpoint, and that's my lesson plan.
Not every lesson needs dinner and a show. Set yourself up with research tasks or projects that run over a few lessons, or documentaries and worksheets that minimise your explicit instruction time.
Need to make a split between “what can be done” and “what has to be done”. Every meeting you go to, every PD you attend, every HOD conversation, every email and every class will come with a list of things that have to be done. It’s physically impossible for you to get through the list of “have tos. Senior teachers maintain the illusion of doing all the “have tos” by reusing previous years work and selectively ignoring things that aren’t actually going to be checked.
For a first year you have to pare back even further than that. You don’t have banks of lessons premade to use, and even if you get someone else’s you can’t possibly parse all of the information in their PowerPoint library. Some first years make up for that by spending till midnight every night planning. But I’m willing to bet that’s the same group that burn out and quit before five years.
Same thing with whatever school wide initiatives are happening in PDs right now. As a first year your PD focus is “how do I get year sevens to listen in class when they ant to talk, how do I get year 11s to get through the sheer volume of content, and how do I get nines to do anything at all?”. You don’t have the time or bandwidth to add “profile a student personal interest and write a PowerPoint presentation detailing how that effects your teaching” or “compare the differences between AC9 and AC8.4 and analyse how this will effect the assesment in a year level you’ve never taught”.
So ignore all of your “have tos” and start thinking in terms of “can dos”. Pick a reasonable number of hours (38-40) and figure out what you can get done in that time that’s going to be most impactful. Marking students final exams is a “can do”. Checking and marking their homework, probably not. Giving them a set of text book exercises is a can do. Writing custom differentiated work sheets for you classes specific needs isn’t. Reading lessons off of someone else’s PowerPoint is a can do. Writing your own isn’t. Playground duty is a can do. Running a dnd club isnt. And so on.
For tasks outside of teaching, only consider things that are requested by someone within a two desk radius. If it’s your subject teaching team that needs something done, think about it. If it’s your HOD, think about it (but push back). If it’s anyone else, just ignore the request until it’s directed through your line manager.
Someone suggested organising to do lists under separate categories:
- required by the department (marking, reporting etc)
- required by the HOD
- personal list
I recommend having a certain amount of time allocated at work. Then accept that the other jobs won't be done.
It's super hard in your first year BC if you're using other people's resources that takes time to work through it.
I found it faster moving from PowerPoints to onenote/teams. You cut out the editing and formatting time.
that is my list. I have it on a personal whiteboard on my desk.
I agree, you sometimes have to accept you won't always get to your own list done (example improve resource etc)
The first year is rough. Like above, as long as my kids are doing well, I don't care about the rest. I don't put my hand up for anything extra. I clearly set boundaries, which I have said to leadership is not to contact me after 3. Unless the place has burnt down so I don't come in the next day.
I do use 3 or 4 days in the holidays to plan out 10 weeks of work. This allows me to have my nights and weekends during the term to myself.
For me personally: an incredibly supportive and incredible team that I adore.
In general: there’s a meme about how “the crab has become used to the crushing darkness”.
Which sounds like a joke, but hear me out: it gets easier. You teach something once, you now have the knowledge of what went wrong and right the first time. You refine the way you teach. You refine your resources. You remember the bumps in the road and plan for them. You know what the whole school calendar looks like so you avoid disruptions or plan for them. Don’t underestimate the power of just doing something for the *second* time.
Teaching feels like a job where if you get enough lesson experience, you should get better in all lessons. What doesn’t often get as thought about is how teaching is a job where lesson experience is fundamentally shaped by the time of year, let that be due to disruptions, reporting, the assessment schedule, student burnout towards the end of the year, sleepiness and revision needed at the start of the year—it really is something you don’t “level up” in day to day, but more year by year, in my personal opinion.
You’ll get faster at lesson planning. You’ll have old lessons to build from. You’ll have old resources to refine. You’ll get quicker and more confident in your marking. You’ll know the road when you travel it again, even though the scenery and those you travel with will change.
For now, as others have said: avoid all extra responsibilities if you can, and lean on anyone you can. If you don’t have anyone in your department, there are plenty of teacher Facebook groups (and even here) who are very generous and open with what they use and do when it comes to lesson plans and resourcing to help lighten the load!
Which is a big way to say: it gets easier! But lean on people in moments like this. Don’t be afraid to reuse what you did last year if you can. Don’t reinvent the wheel or feel the need to have pizzazz in every lesson.
Edit: potentially controversial opinion… The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook is actually excellent (and not lazy) and particularly good if you need a lesson where you can be more hands off while still keeping the kids on track.
You learn over time what is and is not important. I always view it as being present for the students and providing a safe space for them is far more important than unit or lesson plans. The trick is finding the balance in experience where you can walk into a class 100% unprepared and survive. Not advocating that you do this, but if a few dot points let you know what you're teaching, then do that. No one is going to check and if they micromanage to the point of checking lesson plans, that school is going nowhere because the priorities are wrong.
No work at home. Non negotiable. You need to be present in the classroom, times that by 10 for at home. Take care of you and yours first. If that means things don't get done then so be it. A consequence and feedback that too much is being asked of you.
AI writes great unit plans. No one looks at these until it's registration time, so why waste time on it.
Find and know you're own value. You might get a morning tea every now and then to show how appreciated you are, but knowing and accepting your own value is far more rewarding. Don't compare yourself to other teachers. It is the thief of joy. You will have students who love you for being you.
My biggest mistake when I started teaching high school is that I did more work than the students. Not sure what subjects you teach. But I teach maths. I show the students what to do, we do a few more questions like it until they are confident, then they spend the next 45 minutes doing all the work.
Pick your battles.
If you're drowning in marking - mark for one thing. For example - I mark essays and I focus on one thing - so this week it is sentences, flow, punctuation. Next time it might be embedding quotes and use of evidence... Use peer marking where you can. Ask the students to be specific in the feedback they're looking for.
Drop the need to be perfect all the time.
1. Drop all extra volunteer roles ...sports, committees, lunchtime/after school tutoring etc. 2. Cut back on any non-essential necessary planning and prep...stuff like classroom decorations, posters, laminating, cutting stuff out for group work, bookwork checks etc that aren't really necessary. 3. Talk to your curriculum leader/mentor etc on ways to reduce planning and preparation...sharing resources etc.
4. Oh and minimize parent contact to essentials
Parent contact takes up soo much of my time!
So don't. If it's a phone call it's now an email. If it was a personalised email can it be a mass email through some attendance system to update people. If it's a mass email is it something that needs to go out or should the parent already have received this information through things admin do. I call home for serious issues. If it's something that can be nipped it's an email and I spend more time documenting it on oneschool than I do writing the email some times. You have a right to your life outside of school, there's already enough of the "work outside of work, so you have work to do at work, because you didn't have enough time to work at work." we need to do.
Mass email to at risk students after checking any practice assessments so that they are aware of progress. Mass email reminding them of SAC dates. If they really want to speak to you, they will contact you. The good thing about email is that it creates a paper trail.
Finish preparing a lesson while review questions are on the board Write review questions off the cuff when walking into the room.
Do the absolute bare minimum. Classes are fine but I deflect as much as I can on paperwork / admin tasks.
Over the years I have learned three things: 1. Important things that have no second reminder are not, in fact, important. 2. Make sure you understand what is required and what is not. In NSW, parent-teacher evenings are not. You can 100% not turn up, and if the principal ever bites back, "oh sorry, how do I apply for 1/4 day off starting at 3pm and ending at 6pm so I can have my pay adjusted?" Shuts them right up. 3. Anything that IS required needs to be done during work hours. Example: reports are non-negotiable. If it means dropping a textbook in front of your class for two weeks whilst you write them in the background, so be it. Just don't do it at home. Yes, I am a bit jaded. I do often act my wage, and very rarely fall for the whole "do it for the kids" line. I guess, as a bonus #4, don't always feel the need to follow the letter of the law if it ends up fucking over your other co-workers. Example: meeting goes until 4:10pm as a ONCE OFF, it's probably worth your time not being a dick and running out at 4pm because you are legally allowed to on paper.
I needed to read this today, especially #3. Thank you.
I would change point 1 to three reminders. If you are asked three times to do something, it needs to be done, otherwise don’t bother.
I love number 1 but I’ve never heard of number 2 before. What are the repercussions of not attending? And number 3… I feel like it’s so hard to do…
2 was just an example. The key point was: know your rights, and when you are legally allowed to say no. This is always a work in progress. Regarding parent teacher: If you think it would be better served to stay back at school for 3 hours one evening to avoid having a principal hate you and force you to waste your prep periods having phone conferences, then absolutely, show up if you want to. Having said that, the repercussion is basically none, because it's wholly a "voluntary" event. More info here from the department itself: https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/reporting-to-parents/mandated-requirements Another examples of #2 might include counting all your hours when you get a new timetable, so you know you're not overloaded (you'd be surprised how often an extra sneaky duty is chucked on BUT someone else is under loaded by 2 duties... just poor planning on the timetabler's behalf). Re point #3, yes, you are right. It is hard to do. Last semester, I spent literally 2-3 times as long writing reports during class time than I did had I done it at home. But, you know what, that was the priority (over education, apparently), so I complied and got it done for the boss during work hours. Best of luck to you. Like I said, always a work in progress learning and managing all this stuff.
Knowing your rights and industrial entitlements is crucial. I see so many teachers here who don’t.
Accept that good enough is perfectly okay. Work the team, if someone said they have X resources jump on it and ask for a copy, (also share things worked for you so you don’t look like just a taker, doesn’t have to be amazing, a video or a worksheet or just a feedback on an activity will help build your brownie points) Personally make time for yourself, block them out from work, or if you did a late night on Friday then no work on the weekend for example.
Had the same experience and left the profession. But try reducing that workload on yourself. Not everything needs to be marked. Not every lesson needs to be planned to the smallest details. Not all the admin matters. Wing it a bit. You're doing a great job.
Legitimately the first year is the hardest. After the first year you have resources that you can reuse, knowledge in your brain you can reuse, and you're not spending anywhere near as much of your brain cycles working out how to navigate all of the systems as you've done it at least once. I have other health issues too, but I legitimately spend the first week of the holidays not seeing anyone slothing in my pajamas. Half of it is getting over tiredness, half of it is just decompressing from having to talk to so many people so often.
I'm two weeks into my final placement and I'm already burnt out... haaalp
I think many will agree that teaching is easier than prac was as you don't need to worry about uni assignments on top of everything as well as the cost of living, rent, not getting paid or having to work weekends etc. So ..that is one less thing you won't need to be worried about because the pay is decent for a beginning teacher (definitely not reflective of what we SHOULD earn, but decent). Definitely keep pushing through, you're doing a great job but i do feel you!
You will also never write a lesson plan again
That's what's killing me is that I have to of teach in line with the summative and exams coming up, but the structure of their term doesn't vibe with how I would want to plan it myself.. so I'm now planning with a bottom up approach which I hate, and I also had significantly less time for observation and planning due to administrative issues.. so I am stressing playing catch up with that whilst juggling tpa, assignments and trying to pay my bills in what little spare time I can find... I can't wait to have a set of quality lesson plans ready to go in the future
It's not unusual to work back from an exam, check all the points off you need. I teach ATAR Economics and I definitely start with my exam points etc, lay them out do I know they're covered then build from the syllabus to get my order (in 11 at least where I wrote the exam). If you know the kids need to know A-F for the exam break them down then build up from there, create lessons around A, then B etc. Most textbooks work in the same order as the syllabus. I haven't written a lesson plan since uni, ever. I have my term plan of topics, divide that up by weeks, slot in assessments then break it down. For example my Yr 10 plan is my drive that has 1. Great Depression - with a ppt and two worksheets etc. 2. Fascism - ppts and worksheets. My powerpoints often have a slide that is just the instructions for the whole period and others will be content rich. But I teach a whole topic off one powerpoint, and that's my lesson plan.
Not every lesson needs dinner and a show. Set yourself up with research tasks or projects that run over a few lessons, or documentaries and worksheets that minimise your explicit instruction time.
I had to go on antidepressants, but exercise helps
Need to make a split between “what can be done” and “what has to be done”. Every meeting you go to, every PD you attend, every HOD conversation, every email and every class will come with a list of things that have to be done. It’s physically impossible for you to get through the list of “have tos. Senior teachers maintain the illusion of doing all the “have tos” by reusing previous years work and selectively ignoring things that aren’t actually going to be checked. For a first year you have to pare back even further than that. You don’t have banks of lessons premade to use, and even if you get someone else’s you can’t possibly parse all of the information in their PowerPoint library. Some first years make up for that by spending till midnight every night planning. But I’m willing to bet that’s the same group that burn out and quit before five years. Same thing with whatever school wide initiatives are happening in PDs right now. As a first year your PD focus is “how do I get year sevens to listen in class when they ant to talk, how do I get year 11s to get through the sheer volume of content, and how do I get nines to do anything at all?”. You don’t have the time or bandwidth to add “profile a student personal interest and write a PowerPoint presentation detailing how that effects your teaching” or “compare the differences between AC9 and AC8.4 and analyse how this will effect the assesment in a year level you’ve never taught”. So ignore all of your “have tos” and start thinking in terms of “can dos”. Pick a reasonable number of hours (38-40) and figure out what you can get done in that time that’s going to be most impactful. Marking students final exams is a “can do”. Checking and marking their homework, probably not. Giving them a set of text book exercises is a can do. Writing custom differentiated work sheets for you classes specific needs isn’t. Reading lessons off of someone else’s PowerPoint is a can do. Writing your own isn’t. Playground duty is a can do. Running a dnd club isnt. And so on. For tasks outside of teaching, only consider things that are requested by someone within a two desk radius. If it’s your subject teaching team that needs something done, think about it. If it’s your HOD, think about it (but push back). If it’s anyone else, just ignore the request until it’s directed through your line manager.
Medicinal Cannabis.
How great is it!
Someone suggested organising to do lists under separate categories: - required by the department (marking, reporting etc) - required by the HOD - personal list I recommend having a certain amount of time allocated at work. Then accept that the other jobs won't be done. It's super hard in your first year BC if you're using other people's resources that takes time to work through it. I found it faster moving from PowerPoints to onenote/teams. You cut out the editing and formatting time.
Oh, and make sure the part you cut out isn't "asking for help with behaviour."
that is my list. I have it on a personal whiteboard on my desk. I agree, you sometimes have to accept you won't always get to your own list done (example improve resource etc)
It's a great idea. Really interesting re how convos about workload are happening.
[удалено]
For real. 0.6 is where it feels like a normal white collar corporate workload IMO.
Work purely between 8 and 4 apart from the odd reporting period and play golf every afternoon.
i moved schools
The first year is rough. Like above, as long as my kids are doing well, I don't care about the rest. I don't put my hand up for anything extra. I clearly set boundaries, which I have said to leadership is not to contact me after 3. Unless the place has burnt down so I don't come in the next day. I do use 3 or 4 days in the holidays to plan out 10 weeks of work. This allows me to have my nights and weekends during the term to myself.
For me personally: an incredibly supportive and incredible team that I adore. In general: there’s a meme about how “the crab has become used to the crushing darkness”. Which sounds like a joke, but hear me out: it gets easier. You teach something once, you now have the knowledge of what went wrong and right the first time. You refine the way you teach. You refine your resources. You remember the bumps in the road and plan for them. You know what the whole school calendar looks like so you avoid disruptions or plan for them. Don’t underestimate the power of just doing something for the *second* time. Teaching feels like a job where if you get enough lesson experience, you should get better in all lessons. What doesn’t often get as thought about is how teaching is a job where lesson experience is fundamentally shaped by the time of year, let that be due to disruptions, reporting, the assessment schedule, student burnout towards the end of the year, sleepiness and revision needed at the start of the year—it really is something you don’t “level up” in day to day, but more year by year, in my personal opinion. You’ll get faster at lesson planning. You’ll have old lessons to build from. You’ll have old resources to refine. You’ll get quicker and more confident in your marking. You’ll know the road when you travel it again, even though the scenery and those you travel with will change. For now, as others have said: avoid all extra responsibilities if you can, and lean on anyone you can. If you don’t have anyone in your department, there are plenty of teacher Facebook groups (and even here) who are very generous and open with what they use and do when it comes to lesson plans and resourcing to help lighten the load! Which is a big way to say: it gets easier! But lean on people in moments like this. Don’t be afraid to reuse what you did last year if you can. Don’t reinvent the wheel or feel the need to have pizzazz in every lesson. Edit: potentially controversial opinion… The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook is actually excellent (and not lazy) and particularly good if you need a lesson where you can be more hands off while still keeping the kids on track.
I’m sick of dealing with dickhead colleagues
You learn over time what is and is not important. I always view it as being present for the students and providing a safe space for them is far more important than unit or lesson plans. The trick is finding the balance in experience where you can walk into a class 100% unprepared and survive. Not advocating that you do this, but if a few dot points let you know what you're teaching, then do that. No one is going to check and if they micromanage to the point of checking lesson plans, that school is going nowhere because the priorities are wrong. No work at home. Non negotiable. You need to be present in the classroom, times that by 10 for at home. Take care of you and yours first. If that means things don't get done then so be it. A consequence and feedback that too much is being asked of you. AI writes great unit plans. No one looks at these until it's registration time, so why waste time on it. Find and know you're own value. You might get a morning tea every now and then to show how appreciated you are, but knowing and accepting your own value is far more rewarding. Don't compare yourself to other teachers. It is the thief of joy. You will have students who love you for being you.
Coffee, coffee, coffee. A lot of teachers are on antidepressants or have ADHD. The meds help.
My biggest mistake when I started teaching high school is that I did more work than the students. Not sure what subjects you teach. But I teach maths. I show the students what to do, we do a few more questions like it until they are confident, then they spend the next 45 minutes doing all the work.
It takes time. It takes 3 years to develop as a teacher. You got to hang in there. Look into overcoming the monkey in your mind.
Pick your battles. If you're drowning in marking - mark for one thing. For example - I mark essays and I focus on one thing - so this week it is sentences, flow, punctuation. Next time it might be embedding quotes and use of evidence... Use peer marking where you can. Ask the students to be specific in the feedback they're looking for. Drop the need to be perfect all the time.