Teacher Workload Quotes

Parkinson’s law (coined by British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1957) states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

It’s clear that the teaching profession in America was never designed to offer a lifetime of strong wages or a sustainable workload. Our schools have a 200+ year history of undervaluing the necessary skill sets of a good educator, offering low compensation, and making all-consuming demands on teachers’ personal lives due to the perception of the work as a “calling” which they should gladly sacrifice for.

Middle school is prime time for failure, even among kids who have sailed through school up to that point. The combined stressors of puberty, heightened academic expectations, and increased workload are a setup for failure. How parents, teachers, and students work together to overcome those inevitable failures predicts so much about how children will fare in high school, college, and beyond.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to cope with ups and downs of courses and workloads, college-level work, competition, tough teachers, bosses, and others. The crutch: We step in when things get hard, finish the task, extend the deadline, and talk to the adults; thus, kids don’t know that in the normal course of life things won’t always go their way, and that they’ll be okay regardless.

Teacher: Where is your homework? Student: I didn't do it because I didn't want to add to your already heavy workload.

In terms of the workload, the best teachers for kids with slow processing speed tend to: Deemphasize busy work. Show a willingness to adjust homework assignments to “fit” with a student’s pace. Balance the common needs of all the students with the specific needs of individual students. Be excited by the use of technology in their classrooms because it makes it easier to adapt instruction. Be both organized and flexible.

We tend to attribute the complexity and busyness of our lives to a false culprit. We blame it on our environment. The pace of activity in our cities, our workload or office culture, our stage in life, and the current demands on our time are the assumed chief causes of our overwhelmed lives. Quaker missionary Thomas Kelly, writing in 1941, made a different observation after spending a full year “slowing down” and “simplifying” on a twelve-month sabbatical in Hawaii. Like other Americans, he had carried with him to the tropics the “mad-cap, feverish life” he knew on the mainland.15 Your inner life is not a mirror image of your environment. If anything, the opposite is true. We create an environment that mirrors our inner life. Kelly observed: Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!16 All of these teachers are circling around the same thing: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

Teacher: Where is your homework? Student: I didn't do it because I didn't want to add to your already heavy workload. *** What happened when the girl dressed as a spoon left the Halloween party? No one moved. They couldn't stir without her!

For sure! I honestly don’t think I’ve had a break like that since before I went away to college. Becoming a teacher was a lot of work, and being a teacher came with workloads even over the summer. Frankly, I’m not sure I know how to relax anymore.

Teacher: Where is your homework? Student: I didn't do it because I didn't want to add to your already heavy workload. ***