This was my experience as a teacher throughout my career. For the last decade of it I worked an estimated 55 hour week plus, spread over six days, and a substantial part of each and every holiday. This was required for frequently detailed planning, writing course notes for topics that were not treated adequately in the existing A level and GCSE textbooks, coursework marking, and reading around my subject, as subject knowledge is not set in granite and one does not arrive in the classroom with it necessarily already in place from a degree course.
One summer, I kept a record of how much I worked. It amounted to about180 hours (though that was in an unusual year and to do with a fascinating topic).
It was a very stressful job and is almost certainly responsible for some of the chronic health issues I have now been lumbered with, such as high blood pressure, as well as me retiring from the job early to live off personal savings. And in order to afford to do that, I didn't go on holiday for 15 years.
Having said that, it was also an extremely rewarding career, and so I have no desire to play the world's smallest violin here. Also, people in other lines of employment work similar hours without experiencing the same levels of fulfilment but with similar burdens of stress.
Just wanted to dispel the myth that teachers don't do much outside of school hours. Probably some do but they would be a minority.
It is also the case that in some instances, from what I can gather from former colleagues who are still in the classroom, setting work for pupils who are self-isolating as well as those who remain in class has been very demanding, as well as the extra liaising with parents that this entails. The most recent term seems to have been the hardest of their careers for many.
Lastly, it is also mistaken to regard teachers as militant, or their unions. For example, in addition to the frequently voiced complaints about excessive workload and bureaucracy in the form of excessive paperwork, there has been a cull of older, more expensive staff in state schools over the last decade, one undertaken simply as a money-saving measure. Many of these staff were forced out on the pretext that their teaching had suddenly become inadequate. The unions did little or nothing about any of that. As a consequence, they are currently perceived as pretty useless and toothless.
It is also unusual for teachers to take strike action (though it has been known in recent times). Most of the ones I worked with were reluctant to do so and almost all never did. Many would also prefer to return to school tomorrow but are anxious about the risks to their own health, that of their own family members who may have underlying health issues, as well as the families of their own pupils (as we sometimes develop personal attachments to parents we get to know down the years), and the pupils themselves if they have health issues of their own.
Lastly, it is even a mistake to imagine that the profession is uniformly left-wing. Many are but most of the ones I knew were probably centre-left like myself. I have also worked with some terrific staff who vote Conservative and were in favour of Brexit. It's not common, but less unusual than many think.
It really is the media who create the false impression that some people still often maintain about teachers, though I get the impression that a majority can see past all that these days.
