Teaching is more admin than actual teaching
I’ve been teaching for many years and every year I feel more and more exhausted. I realised it has a lot to do with the huge amount of admin that we are expected to do.
I actually love teaching. I love watching my students faces light up when they achieve a goal. I love teaching a new concept and having my students engaged and excited. I don’t even mind sorting out their disagreements and directing them the right way. I left an admin job because I hated the paperwork and was excited to do something more practical.
Lately, we have the expectation of so much paperwork. Emails from parents throughout the day who expect an immediate reply (unless it’s urgent I don’t respond), gone are the days of a paper note or a quick stop in for a chat. If it’s on the parents mind you hear about it right away, sometimes I’ve had emails from parents in the middle of the night.
NCCD admin is a killer. We have individual support plans (that must be uploaded in several places), class plans, differentiation on unit plans, weekly evidence for each child to be placed up, NCCD inclusion forms, notes and probably other things I’ve missed.
Unit plans were once so much easier. Now, at my school, we are expected to account for every minute in the classroom and an average unit plan is over 50 pages! Then, when they are checked you are always missing something because they are (leadership) continuing to add new things but not always informing us.
Then you have the school’s own admin they make you do. If a student even has the slightest bump, we have to fill out paperwork. If a child tells their parent something (perfect example this week is a child being “bullied” because another child made a face at them) then we have to investigate and the parent wants all the details. It is exhausting!
If all this was at least reduced, we could go back to the job we love the most.