A Typical Teacher Day

I've been catching up on some edublogs, and I came across a post on sweattoinspire.com in which Todd Bloch, a #miched educator, shared what a typical day is like for him as a teacher.  At the end of the post, he challenges other teachers to share what their typical days are like, so here's a typical day for me:

5:00am
Wake up and start getting ready for the day.  Make sure I pack a lunch because there is no time during my lunch period to leave the building on a normal school day.  Also pack a snack because lunch is so early and short, my stomach is grumbling by the end of the school day.

6:00am
Leave for school.  I carpool almost every day with another teacher who lives close to me.  Carpooling is great for a few reasons.  1) It cuts down on gas costs, which leaves more money from my starting-teacher's salary to pay for things like student loans.  2) Carpooling helps me stay awake when it's my turn to drive because it makes the drive more interesting because 3) our carpooling discussions are like therapy, planning, and brainstorming all rolled into one.  Some of my best ideas for lesson have come from carpool conversations.

6:38am
This is what time we get to school.  Every day.  Pretty much no matter when we leave.  It's like we've discovered a wormhole or something.  We aren't really required to be at school until first hour starts at 7:11, but we have to get there at least a half hour early to get ready because once that first bell rings, THERE IS NO TIME.

6:38-7:11
About a half hour to get everything ready for the day - make any copies, sort materials, excavate my desk from the layer of miscellaneous papers from the day before, check in with any colleagues about plans for the day if necessary, answer questions for NHS kids who stop by to sign up for activities (I am the NHS sponsor at our school), chat with the group of students that like to hang out in my classroom before school every day, write the new objectives for the day on the board, and, oh yeah, run to the bathroom really fast before I'm not able to go once class starts.

7:11-9:00am
Teach my first two hours of the day.  Most classes at our school have around 30 students - I am lucky that a couple of mine are smaller, but four of my six classes are completely full with 30 kids and sometimes an extra directed study student.  In my classroom, we always get started right away, and once we start, we don't stop until the bell rings.  My friends who are not teachers tell me about how they sometimes have to prepare a presentation for work.  I'm sure that those presentations are very important and that they're different from what I do in my classroom, but teaching is kind of like preparing two or three presentations every day (or more, depending on how many preps you have) and then presenting it six times.

9:00-9:57am
Prep Time! Plan for the rest of the day or the next day...or maybe even the day after that if I'm really on top of everything and have been working a lot at home.  Prep Time can also turn into Meeting With the Principal Time or Return Parent Phone Calls/Emails Time or Sub for Another Teacher Time or several other things, sometimes with little or no notice.

10:00-10:32am
Teach half of fourth hour, which is split by lunch.  Kids get pretty excited and hungry around this time of the day.

10:32-11:02am
Half hour scheduled for lunch.  Lunch actually starts whenever all of the students are gone from my classroom - after I answer any questions or sort out any issues from the first half of class.

11:02-11:29am
Teach the other half of fourth hour.  Kids are either pretty excited or sleepy around this time of day...something to do with just having scarfed down weird combinations of foods in record time.

11:34am-2:20pm
Teach three more classes.  This year, I alternate subjects each hour, so I teach German, then English, then German, then English again, and so on. It's a great brain exercise switching languages every hour every day.  Also, sometimes "teaching" involves a lot more than what I expected it to before I actually started teaching.  Like telling a student that the middle of the classroom is not the best place to reapply deodorant.  Or having to help a student get his glasses untangled from his hair (I have no idea how this happened).

2:21pm
Breathe.  And go to the bathroom.

2:22-3:00pm or 3:30pm or 4:00pm or 4:30pm (depending on the day)
Grade and/or get ready for the next day.  Depending on the day of the week, there could also be staff meetings or professional development or Tea Club or NHS meetings/activities or tutoring or giving a student a make-up test or meeting with colleagues to talk about planning.  Right now, I'm lucky that I can usually stay as late as I need to.  A lot of teachers have to leave by a certain time each day (to pick up children and things like that), but that means that a lot of them are doing more work at home.  This year, I leave school around 4:00 most days.

On the way home
Think and talk about the day with my carpool buddy.

At home
Do any prep or grading that I didn't finish at school.  I've learned that I'm never really done with everything for this job.  Even if I had every day of the year planned at the beginning of September, there would always be work to do - rethinking plans, making things better, integrating new tools/ideas/requirements and of course, grading.  This year, I average about 1.5 hours of work at home per night.  This varies widely though, depending on the time of year, the units I'm teaching, and the amount of Netflix I watch while entering grades.

10:00pm
Go to bed and get ready to do it all over again in the morning.


I don't mean for this post to sound negative.  I really do feel it is an accurate description of what I do most days, and I know that some people are not aware of what it can be like to be a teacher.  I really do love my job.  I don't mind being busy, and I absolutely love the time when I'm actually teaching.  I feel like being around the kids gives me energy to get through these crazy days, even if I am sometimes exhausted when I get home.  And I look forward to seeing the kids again every day when I'm walking into school at 6:38am.