this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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This varies pretty heavily depending on what state you're in
Assuming that program, which is notoriously fickle, doesn't end at the whim of the federal government
For elementary and middle school this is probably true. If you're teaching high school, you have to spend that time grading or prepping for the next year. There are also extracurricular activities, so during the school year you can easily run 60+ hour workweeks with effectively no downtime.
It only takes a few years to set up a generalized "course" if you're allowed to choose what grades and what educational course you're teaching, i.e 10th grade u.s history or 9th grade world history. Of course the shit you may be contractually required to teach, or materials you're forced to cover may change year by year, or you're forced to adopt some kind of new educational formula or technology by your bosses because of some bullshit or another, etc. You may not have as much time off as younger grades but it's still not a complete shitshow.
Big if. My partner teaches - blue state, great union and benefits - and based on her experience you couldn't get me in the classroom if the alternative was a pit of alligators, especially for red state conditions and pay. Admin is either overwhelmed, checked out, or incompetent, the school board continually pats itself on the back for decreasing their schools' resources in the name of nebulous 'savings', her courses change every year, she has to buy books and teaching materials herself. That's not even touching all of the behavioral issues she has to deal with on a daily basis.
Granted, many of her colleagues, who have learned how to skate by doing the bare minimum and dumping a lot of work on the remaining teachers who actually care about the quality of instruction would probably say the job is pretty easy.
And that's not dealing with the elephant in the room: you have all the institutional conditions necessary to create a 'standardized' course so you can do less prepping for the next year. But the students' needs are never standardized. It is indeed a myth that teachers have limited obligations during the off seasons - you have administrative duties, meetings, gradings and prep time to do. But teacher's obligations are doubled from expected during on seasons simply because they are expected to implement a standardized course according to public (laws, curriculums and such) and private (whoever owns the school and textbook systems you're meant to apply) requirements, while also personalizing stuff for classes and students that are all massively different from each other. If you teach 60 kids in two different schools, they won't be the same and they won't be the same as the next 60 kids the following year either.
Very true! Her school does mixed classes, so she has to come up with alternative work for the "high cap" kids while simultaneously providing additional attention to the kids that arrive to high school unable to write a full paragraph in a class period. The variability between classes in a given year also seems to be really big.
that sounds like a disservice to literally everyone involved
That could be the tagline for the entire US school system, tbh.
The motivating idea is that giftedness is largely a function of SES and that the high cap kids should still get peer socialization rather than be kept separate, but when class sizes are in the mid 30s and she has to keep answering emails from parents who want to make sure their high cap kids are getting adequate enrichment it ends up being a massive headache.
yeah i was probably fucked up for life because they chose not to skip me a grade when i was 8 or whatever. guess my parents should've let me watch power rangers instead of PBS.
this was also at a time when you didn't get diagnosed with shit if you had good grades.