Editor: As a high school teacher of 22 years, I often find it sad to hear ignorant people make blanket statements.
These statements can suggest that all police officers spend half their day eating donuts, all small business owners cheat on their taxes and teachers only work six hours per day. All show an ignorant bias. As you might have figured out, this last statement is the one bothering me.
Consider this. I teach 200 students and test these students once every two weeks. If I spend 10 minutes to mark one test, then 200 tests will take 2,000 minutes to mark. That translates to 33 hours of my time outside of the class.
This does not include meeting with parents, returning e-mails, entering marks and attendance, marking quizzes and homework as well as extra help and extra curricular activities.
So, if you want to tell me that I am not worth $40 an hour, I can live with that.
But please don’t tell me that academic teachers don’t work just as hard as the rest of society.
Rick Friesen,
Surrey