In a commentary published by CNA, Jason Tan asks the million-dollar question: Would a four-day school week work in Singapore? He considers some of the pros, cons, and potential knock on effects, before concluding that ultimately, “changes must lead to better well-being for students [and] teachers.” He writes, “If a four-day school week fails to adequately address the factors negatively affecting students’ and teachers’ mental well-being, mere tinkering with the length of the school week would then not make much sense at all.”

Thank you, Mr Tan, for saying what many educators are probably thinking.

I have to agree with him: a four-day school week would, on paper, provide more opportunities for rest, and I don’t think many teachers and students would say no to that; but such a shift would do little to address other key issues which are leading to stress and burnout. I do not pretend to speak for today’s students—their world is very different from the world I lived in as a child—so I’m going to confine myself to some thoughts on the underlying issues which need addressing, from the perspective of an ex-schoolteacher.

 

Measure the work being done at a granular level in order to honour it.

Here’s the data school administrators need to know and work with, in order to really see how a teacher’s time is taken up:

• How much time does it actually take to correct the different types of assignments a subject entails, e.g. a worksheet, or an essay, or a project? Multiply that by the number of students a teacher actually has in their classroom (or assigned marking load).

• How many of such worksheets, essays, projects, etc. is a teacher minimally expected to give during a term? How many of such assignments would be expected of classes of differing capacities?

• How much time would marking mock papers etc. take, especially when it’s the crunch right before the exam?

• How much time would lesson preparation take? (Assuming, of course, that the school really does want teachers to innovate and cater to their actual students, rather than just reusing old or existing material?)

• How much time would it then take to differentiate these lessons for particular groups of students?

• How much time would it take to renew lesson resources, even if the department is pooling their efforts?

• How much time does each of these additional duties take? Some examples would be:

  • Setting of tests and exams

  • Helping students catch up or close learning gaps

  • Benchmarking

  • Department duties

  • CCA duties

  • Mentorship duties

  • Contacting and coping with parents

  • Relief duties

  • Administrative duties

  • Committee duties

  • Professional development and upskilling

  • Management-related duties, e.g. time to follow up with team members

Of course there are a million other additional duties different teachers undertake, and I imagine there will naturally be variation in the time needed depending on a complex interplay of factors, so these data can perhaps be captured in ranges. But capture them we must, because it’s really starting to feel like a teacher’s workload on paper fails to adequately capture the actual time which must be spent on accomplishing basic tasks.

I understand top brass are there to “set direction” and “drive vision,” but how can these lofty goals be accomplished if managers and administrators don’t see the nuts and bolts of the regular staff’s working day? On paper, a task looks so simple: “engage stakeholders,” for instance, or “provide timely feedback.” But at that zoomed out, macro level, everything looks simple. How much time would “engaging stakeholders” actually translate to, in real seconds, minutes, or hours? Would all the things teachers (have to) do fit into a 45-hour work week? Incidentally, would getting actual numbers finally, finally be the answer to those who invariably counter every suggestion with, “but teachers get holidays off! What are they complaining about?”

 

Acknowledge that heart work happens after hours.

I would hesitate to make the above suggestion to a real life manager, though, because I can easily see how this would be turned into an exercise in micromanagement and surveillance of teachers. “Ah, but an English teacher is supposed to do 12 hours of marking. This year, you only averaged 11 hours!” “Ah, but you did not do 2 hours of relief; I see from the data collected from the chip embedded in your left ear that you went to the bathroom for 10 minutes!”

I exaggerate, of course, but there is a very real danger, given the current climate of obsessive bean counting, to quantify everything a teacher does in their day, in order to punish rather than acknowledge. So, it’d be great if everyone would also stop a moment to acknowledge that the emotional and psychological effect of teaching work does not stop even when the work day ends.

This emotional/psychological burden can take many different forms. A good version would be thinking of lesson ideas when engaged on a personal hobby—this is great for innovation and authentic teaching, but it does mean the teacher is never truly “off duty.” A more stressful but necessary version of this “after hours” burden would be, being available and on call for a student whom you know is experiencing some difficult issues. Then there’s the needlessly stressful version of after hours work, such as “requests” from the higher ups which come at the last minute. And finally, there are downright unhealthy versions of the emotional/psychological work done by teachers, e.g. coping with anxiety from toxic work culture (which is an entire blog post in itself).

Yes, please measure the actual hours teachers (have to) spend on various tasks, but at the same time, please acknowledge that the emotional and psychological work for a teacher never really stops.

Telling teachers they must learn to draw boundaries, switch off and take care of themselves is not acknowledgement of the issue. It simply puts teachers into a false binary position where they have to choose between self care or their vocation. If you’re going to respond to teachers in distress with “Please take more time for self care,” teachers will lose faith in the system, because you’ve just given them one additional task when what they’re really asking for is help to make time.

This is one situation where society cannot have its cake and eat it too: if society wants caring teachers who will go above and beyond, we have to acknowledge and work on the emotional and psychological cost of going above and beyond.

 

Stop holding teachers hostage!

Speaking of “cost”: I once mortally offended another educator when I insisted that teaching is not just a calling, but a job. I genuinely don’t understand why this should be offensive, though. I’m sure there are those who would still be a school teacher even if they received no remuneration; I also believe these people would be very few in number.

I don’t think there’s any shame in acknowledging that a person is doing this job for money—to keep themself and their loved ones alive and reasonably comfortable. I don’t think this acknowledgement negates the deep love a person may have for teaching. Both things can be true at once: this is a job which pays the bills; it is also a very important calling.

More importantly, it’s precisely this idea that teaching is a vocation that allows some people to hold all educators, in effect, hostage. Let me be clear, I do think teaching is a vocation. But I do also think some people use this to justify unreasonable expectations of teachers. “Why are you complaining about the work of contact tracing? Don’t you care about your students?” Yes, I do care, but if the work is so crucial, then the organisation should be mobilising efforts to bring on suitable help to get the work done, rather than expect teachers to absorb the new work needed.

I recently learned the term “lifestyle creep” from an ex-colleague. Rephrased to “expectation creep,” we can see a similar thing happening over the years to teachers not just in Singapore, but worldwide. I am the child of two teachers; my aunt and other family members are or were teachers; my friends are teachers. What I hear from all these people, and from more experienced colleagues, is that the actual workload and expectations of a teacher have steadily increased over the years. And this is before the unprecedented stresses exerted upon the system by Covid.

I suspect some of this “expectation creep” comes from within teachers themselves: as professionals and people who care about our young charges, we can always see ever more ways we can do something, do something better, help just one more starfish. This is a good thing, because it is a sign of a profession which takes pride in its work and strives to do even better.

But what happens when the “expectation creep” is imposed by external sources and stretches our (already strained) resources? For example, to what extent are teachers:

• Expected to keep parents updated on daily matters, like any homework assigned? (I recognise that the answers to this question would depend on the age of the students…)

• Expected to organise school events and outreach events beyond their subject areas?

• Expected to be on call and available for students in mental or physical distress?

• Expected to be traffic wardens and jagas?

Or, and this is maybe the more pertinent question: shouldn’t these important duties have been assigned to the relevant professionals? I do wonder if, as in many other educational systems in the world, teachers here have taken on (or been forced to take on) what would have been full time jobs in their own right, simply because we are teachers and we would go very far for our charges. However, any organisation doing this must understand that they’ve basically “cut costs” by assigning more work to an already stretched pool of workers. How sustainable will this be in the long run?

 

The goal is sustainability, not “making teachers happy”.

CNA once asked the question, “what can make our teachers happier and less overworked?” The issue at stake here is not what makes teachers happy, really, but what would be most sustainable for the industry in the long run.

Seeking to make a group of people happy is a fool’s exercise. Everyone has a different source of happiness, and happiness is a short-lived emotion. Over time, we will get desensitised to whatever once made us happy. Sustainability, though, is an achievable goal, and a necessary one.

To return to the original question, then… would having a four-day school week make teachers happy? Yes, of course. Another day for rest, recreation, family, etc. would be heavenly. Even if it were not a “true” four-day school week, and the extra day were given over to marking, or CCA, it would still be a slight improvement on the current schedule.

Would a four-day school week make the current system more sustainable? No.

Because teachers are not being stressed by work expanding to meet current work hours, like in Parkinson’s law—teachers are stressed because the hard and heart work they’re doing already far exceeds the existing work week. Teachers are not overworked because they’re inefficient or because of Covid—teachers are overworked because there has been massive “expectation creep”, and the situation does not seem set to change any time soon.

The thing is this. The current system is still functioning, but not because the system is great; it works because the people in the system are sacrificing something to make it work. We’re all probably sacrificing a different something—and there are some who are sacrificing other people’s somethings—to make this system work, but a system that works based on the wear and tear of its component elements is a losing proposition in the long run.

 

Image: Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash