Teachers are civil servants and their working style is regulated by educational regulations. Should there arise a public image, teachers could be lazy, only missing knowledge or misinterpretation of the educational regulations can be the reason. Of course it’s not thinkable that the educational regulations make teachers to lazy teachers…

The teacher profession, and that should be highlighted at the beginning, is a profession where people need vocation and natural skills. Otherwise daily life easily may shift to recurring tragedy. One know, that there is a not exactly known number of teachers, which are fully unable to deal with the group dynamics of class groups because they totally don’t understand it. Another group found out methods to keep the process more or less under control. But the real teachers belong to the last group. They have the natural attitude to be ideal teachers, for them teaching is mainly fun. After that brief detour to the psychology, we will return to our main matter. Why a “are teachers lazy” discussion? We want a bit to brighten the background:

In average teachers weekly hold 20 active lesson units, 50’ each.

A rough estimation shows the yearly workload. 52 weeks minus 8 (main holidays) minus 1 (Christmas) minus 1 (Easter) is 42 weeks. 42 x 20 is 840 lesson units per year. For comparison: the typical employee has to work 52 minus 5 (vacation) is 47 weeks per year. Calculating 38,5 working hours, the result is about 1800 hours, about 960 plus, that’s more than double the teacher’s.

Over hours of typical employees have a value of about 1% referring to the monthly salary. 50’ units of teachers count 7,5% of the monthly salary. With about 13 over hours (if approved) teachers may double their income. In any case over hours have prominent impact to the final sum.

Frequently is mentioned that teachers do not only work during lesson units. There is a lot of additional work to do. In summary the total workload is higher than that of typical employees. If that’s true, the over hour calculation seems a bit strange. If teachers are working anyway, why nevertheless they can set off over hours?

There is wide potential to discuss those and similar matters with devotion. Provocations released in several magazines prove that. But all these matters miss the real target. Two criteria seem to be important:

• Teachers should not be judged referring to the hour units they teach, but to the total duration they need to achieve high quality education combined with mainly low stress study for their pupils.
  

• Teachers should get a fitting but performance dependent salary like all other groups.

To get closer analyzing in this direction we want to proceed. What, if someone would ask the simple question: With a given budget, what must we do, to educate pupils for a good all-round education combined with a selected specific education, to prepare them best for today's market needs. As second condition the existing scope of teachers and educational environment should be empowered best.

The question is not, to do more of the “same old stuff” but to look for new educational models achieving high quality results within reduced time periods.

The goals of all-around education could be, that pupils are able to discuss and shape their minds about actual matters of politics, economy, arts, history, languages, sports, technology etc. To teach someone the art to solve complicated equations should be only part of this education if somewhere necessary.

The proposed modules for specific education should be redesigned in a recurring process. This would guarantee competence in innovation. Such requirements are rather unknown today. Therefore also ways of permanent teacher education would be necessary. Maybe even the industry would support…

Booking of such modules should be dedicated either as education for a certain profession or as preparation for a later high school study.

A supporting statistics package including advice should guarantee a realistic assessment of market situation and actual trends. High potential for disillusion is given, if one recognizes at the end of his study, that the acquired skills nobody needs…

Early starting but recurring alignment of own interests and market needs provides advantage.

In case of such model, the pupil could select a fitting choice of all-around education plus specific modules and even move during his educational period.

A matter of importance is also the total duration of ones education. What if the system would work like a competition in order to achieve given goals within the shortest possible period. This should not be misunderstood. The goal is not to fix the duration in advance and to produce stress if goals need longer for achievement. The target is to clarify the goals and to challenge pupil’s creativity to find faster ways.

Many will say now, why all that, why the noise, exactly that way the system works today, anyway…

Answer: unfortunately today a lot of required specialists cannot be provided by the educational system.

This leads back to today’s educational structure. Listening to the actual discussion about lazy teachers, the visible main result is the recognition of the systems competence not to move. The competence to create resistance against all ideas of change. Main keeper of that competence are the unionists. They built up their mental models many years ago and never redesigned it till now. They are totally fixed only to repeat their old phrases. Doing that, they forgot the real target of their mission. The target to ask for steps, safeguarding a successful future. In the past, the demand of higher income and decreasing workload was the focus. But in periods of fast change, safeguarding income only is possible by high efficiency alignment of output to market needs. Only if one makes that perfect, he will be able to cash in future. Understanding that, competence in resistance is totally in contradiction with the real goals and will only lead in tragedy.

One will ask now, what’s the connection between that and lazy teachers? The answer, only the small word “lazy”. Not the teachers are lazy but their organizations are lazy, lazy in terms of will and competence for innovation.

In the economy such laziness is punished by flop, bankruptcy, etc. For financing public services, thank heaven the state has the large group of tax charging people…

And the budgetary unbalance increases and increases and increases and…

A case study comparing an article of a magazine and an article of ebepe is available on another page. Try that too…

Lazy Teachers 2 R1-20000705