THE ALLIANCE of Concerned Teachers is calling for the easing of public school teachers’ workload, citing that theirs is the heaviest compared to the workload of teachers in local private schools or public universities, and their counterparts in neighboring countries.
They also suggest for giving public school teachers sufficient time to prepare their lessons, check outputs, compute grades and monitor the progress of their students so that quality teaching can be delivered and education recovery be realized.
Indeed, the Department of Education (DepEd) has maxed up all public school teachers with six hours daily teaching and administrative duties, with others even given workload that exceeds six hours. This is equivalent to 30 hours of teaching in a week. This load exceeds those in private schools, state colleges and universities even those abroad.
Non-stop teaching for six hours daily is simply inhumane. It is equivalent to six to nine classes handled daily for 40 minutes to one hour class time, depending on the subject taught. Factor in the number of students in these subjects – from 45 to 60, or more! Our teachers are very tired after the day’s teaching, and their remaining two hours of work a day are spent on making reports and non-teaching duties.
In reality, lesson preparation, checking of outputs and grade computation are brought home and done beyond work hours without proper compensation, while this should not be case as these are integral duties of a teacher.
Teachers still spend a lot of time on lesson preparation because it is no longer possible to just chalk-talk but visual presentations and different class activities are needed. It also takes a long time to check the output because the classes are large.
The 1967 Magna Carta for Public School Teachers provides for a maximum six hours of teaching time per day while the remaining two hours of eight-hour work should be devoted to lesson preparation and other teaching-related duties.
Overworking our teachers is counterproductive to education recovery. They need reasonable teaching load and less non-teaching load. They need more time to prepare lessons and fulfill other teaching-related duties to be able to deliver quality teaching. They also need their rightful time to rest.
