Working long hours is not good for you or your school

This article first appeared in the Eduk8me newsletter. Be sure to subscribe to be the first to get articles such as this.

There are some of us who wear busyness as a badge of honor, the the research shows that there are diminishing returns for the length of time you work on a project. While crunch time is always expected at various times during the year, there is an issue if every day it is crunch time. When employees are working 60-80 EVERY week, this is symptomatic of issues with management and procedures.

It may seem like a district is saving money when getting more time out of their teachers, but any monetary savings is lost due to inefficiencies that occur once a teacher is approaching a 40 hour work week. The pandemic has shown that workers can be as production in 32 hours as they were in 40 hours. This fact and the push for work from home has managers freaking out. What are they there for if their workers are productive without them?

In August, we are all under crunch time, but if that crunch time extends in to September there needs to be some discussion about duties and procedures.