Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Time out of school. 
Some of the teachers in this study described a clear separation
between work and home or between their professional and personal lives. This
separation had both temporal and spatial markers. That is, these teachers tended
to describe teaching as work that was time and space specific, delimited by the
school day and by the school walls. Comments such as the following character-
ized this orientation:
Teacher 1: I try to keep work separate from the rest of my life, so I try not
to take it [schoolwork] home with me. (Male high school math teacher)
Teacher 2: I leave at 4:00 p.m. If I can’t get everything done [by] then, what
is left can wait. (Female middle school math teacher)
Teacher 3: If it doesn’t get done at school, it doesn’t get done. (Male high
school science teacher)
Teacher 4: I feel more refreshed and enjoy work more if I can get away for
some time each day. (Female fourth-grade teacher)
A Springdale High School mathematics teacher commented that his ‘‘family comes
first, so I don’t like to take things home with me. There is enough time for me
to do everything I need to do here.’’ A male science teacher had three small chil-
dren at home and was responsible for them in the evenings, while his wife
worked. Hereported doing schoolwork before school, on weekends, and ‘‘in the
spaces.’’
Many teachers described doing grading or preparation in the evenings or on week-
ends. A number of teachers commented that they had to work extraordinarily

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hard (e.g., ‘‘every waking moment,’’ ‘‘100 hours a week’’) when they first started
teaching, but once they could draw on a backlog of experience, they felt they
could ease up. However, there was no clear correlation between length of experi-
ence and amount of time teachers reported spending on schoolwork in or out of
school.
For still other teachers, schoolwork has no clear boundaries; teaching for them
is an all-consuming profession. These teachers expressed a love for teaching-both
for the students and the subject. Nearly all taught in ‘‘high-income’’ schools. The
exception was a female math teacher who prided herself on having six prepara-
tions at Uptown High, a multiethnic high school in an urban district.
I love calculus. I’ve taught that for 19 years, with very good success, and
approximately 75 percent of my students have passed the AP test. That’s tak-
ing all the years together. About 2 years ago, I had 96 percent [pass]—just one
student who did not pass. We’re talking about 23 students in a regular old
high school. We had the best results of all the public schools in the city of
Pine. Better than the magnet schools and the specialty schools. And the kids
have gone on to college. I have contact with a lot of them. A lot of them are
now working as engineers, doctors, and computer people, doing all kinds of
wonderful things. A lot of them come back, or call me up, write me a note.
An elementary teacher described arriving at school at 6:30–6:45 a.m. and some-
times staying until 9:00 p.m. at night. She was in charge of staff development for
the district, and, though ‘‘exhausted,’’ her eyes sparkled as she described the
wealth of experiences she helps to orchestrate: an all-school journal, a young au-
thors’ conference ‘‘where their stories are sent to published authors,’’ and a unit
on South Africa. Words like ‘‘wonderful,’’ ‘‘extraordinary,’’ and ‘‘exhilarating’’ ani-
mated the conversation of these teachers, sometimes along with phrases like ‘‘I
don’t know how long I can keep this up’’ or ‘‘I’m exhausted much of the time.’’
An AP biology teacher, who has student experiments littering her classroom and
who does ‘‘real science’’ with a small number of students before school and on
weekends, described her involvement:
Well, I usually get there before 7:30 a.m.; on lab days I get there between 6:30
and 7:00 a.m. It’s certainly not unusual for me to stay until between 5:00 and
6:00 p.m. at night. It just gets away from me . . . . I’ll put in a long night
at home, but it’s hard to do that if I don’t have to because I’m so exhausted.
If you get up at 4:30 a.m. and it’s 9:00 a.m., you’re not real efficient. And usu-
ally I’ll catch up on the weekends . . . . I mean, science is a lot of work.
The good scientist, somebody who’s really cutting edge, they’re (sic) probably
spending 80 hours a week in the lab minimum. You know, they’re in there
all the time. It’s . . . . a day and night kind of job. So I don’t know, I wonder

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sometimes how long I’m going to last. I do. I honestly do. I can’t imagine my-
self teaching at this level of involvement for too long.