Teachers at Benilde-St. Margaret’s are being overworked and are stressed out over their workload. In addition to daily tasks such as planning lessons and grading work, teachers are required to do hall monitoring duties, and if they work in the English or math departments, they have to manage the resource centers.

Having to do hall monitoring duties is a big hassle for teachers. It cuts out of time that they could be creating better lesson plans and grading students’ work. “I understand why we need to [monitor halls], but I don’t think it’s a good use of my time. There was a year or so in the past when the school hired someone to monitor halls and it was such a treat not to have to do it,” history teacher Megan Kern said in an email interview.

Teachers have to do more and more to satisfy parents and students. They are expected to stay on after school to provide extra help for students, stay on top of emails, and provide office hours for students. “There’s a lot of pressure from parents and admin to do lots of things to provide students with lots of chances to ‘practice’ and ‘do well’ (aka raise the grade),” Kern said.

Teachers have a lot of work that they have to take home. The grading, lesson planning, and revising that they do at home is work that they are not getting paid for. “In English especially, the amount of grading and the time it takes to do that grading is a lot, and the expectations for feedback and turn around time are very high, so in order to fulfill our requirements as teachers, we all work at minimum an hour a day outside our contracted hours,” English teacher Callianne Olson said in an email interview.

A common misconception is that teachers have time during prep hours to get all their work done. This is not true, as the workload that the teachers have is too great to get done in a one hour period and they have to take work home. “People seem to think that our prep hours are times when we just hang out and that is not the case at all. The one actual free prep hour that I have is the time I try to prepare curriculum, make copies, run errands, and grade whatever I can,” Olson said.

Daily tasks such as planning lessons and grading work and doing hall monitoring duties, in addition to working in the english or math departments recourse center, are leaving teachers overworked and stressed out over work load.