Would love to know!

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Home : 2002 : February : 27

Would love to know!
By Less time on paperwork?? How?

I appreciate the sentiments in the last two posts and am glad you have found ways to make the job more manageable. Still, I can certainly sympathize with the poster who says she has 20 minutes of actual planning time in
a day and that it is physically impossible to do all that needs to be done. The paperwork our teachers are asked to fill out for assessment and record-keeping is massive and never-ending. Target-setting and differentiation require many hours spent poring over student work, and mean that most work must be marked. Anything that meets a curriculum target must be monitored and recorded, and

since the curriculum is so full we don't even get through it in a year, that means that the vast majority of student work must be at least briefly examined. I don't know what it is like in other schools, but I know that I will spend a good few weeks of the summer getting my records in order to pass to the next teacher, and even then they will fall well below the standard that is set out by our school policies. I love being with the kids but know very well that they suffer because I spend so much time on paperwork that I have less energy than I would otherwise have to plan, and less energy left over for them. And I always have the nagging feeling that I am not doing a good job (as defined by our written policies), no matter how many hours I put in. Sorry to repeat a vent, but I just don't know that creative time management is going to be much of a solution for many people. Twenty minutes is twenty minutes, no matter how creative you are with it. Can you tell us more about what you do to manage all this? Any advice would be most appreciated.