A week in the life of a teacher!

I love my job; it is quick paced, people centred, creative and provides huge job satisfaction. Each week I get to interact with some 380 different students of all ages and academic interests and work in a staff team of over 60 people. There is such team work in all elements of the job and working with others provides a lot of opportunities to not only learn your craft better, but laugh along the way!

My average week generally looks like this: Arrive at school at 7.30am, leave school approximately 5.00pm. I teach 39 hours across a fortnight (out of a possible 50, it would be 42 if I did not have a responsibility for teaching & learning standards in school) leaving me with 5-6 hours of non-contact time across the week. Each week I have to plan my 19/20 lessons for the year 8-13 classes that I teach Chemistry to and prepare the resources to ensure good progress is made. I spend 60 minutes a week with my pastoral form with students from different year groups (on top of the 39 teaching hours) and get to deliver a 20 minute PSHE lesson once a week to a year 10 group. In terms of meetings, my first one is 8.15am on Monday morning for 10 minutes, 60 minutes on Monday afternoon until 4.20pm, an 8.15am on Wednesday for 10 minutes, 8.20am for 30 minutes on a Thursday, plus any line management or department meetings once a fortnight. Each week I generally mark 60 books (around 3 hours of work), plus any assessments; there can be weeks when you have to mark several hundred test papers or several thousand worth of marks! I also run a 60 minute subject clinic after school session for my A-Level students on a Friday for those that need extra help. I complete 30 minutes worth of corridor duty each week and spend around 30 minutes a day on emails. On top of these there are many more small jobs, which have to be completed; phone calls home, catching students up, discussing lessons with peers, detention setting, report writing, data entry, printing (I spend at least 1 hour each week just printing!), trip planning, extra curricular events, student conversations for those on low attendance or grades and additional responsibility jobs (I lead on teaching and learning so often have to prepare meetings for staff, complete lesson observations, read the most current research around education) .

Overall, the job has a great deal of diversity and team work. It is very fast paced, with many balls being juggled at once and most people work around 50 hours a week. But I would not swap it, it is fantastic and the week flies by!