How Much Time Does a Teacher Have in the Classroom?

A teacher should consider how much time they must actually fill with quality instruction and get a better idea of the complexity of their task. If we first look at the number of days at school, we can say that a typical school year has a total of 180 days in many school districts and in total a day of about 7 1/2 hours of contact time. Early elementary school may have a shorter day, but for now we will use a 7 hour contact time (with 1/2 hour for lunch.

This means a possibility of 180 days x 7 hour day for a total of 1260 hours of potential teacher/student contact. This time includes a lot of non-instructional time. If the children move from classroom to classroom, they move 7 times per day, and they use 6 minutes in each move then this has used a total of 18 hours of simply walking in the halls. If you want to consider the lunch time, that would add up to about 90 hours of lunchtime. Now if we only say that they all have mathematics during one period every day and that is a 55 minute class, then you have: 165 hours of mathematics. (You might have thought it would have been a full 180 hours, but that loss of 5 minutes builds up. You can continue with every subject for every part of the day.

Suppose they only have 55 minutes of music one time per week, this would be a total of 33 hours of music for the entire year. This would be the same if they only went out for physical education one time per week for the whole year.

You should be able to calculate all the subjects and all the totals for an entire year, but you will lose much more contact time for many other things. Every time you have a "club day", a student announcement, a bomb threat, a fire drill, a tornado drill, a state mandated test, a guidance announcement, a visit from a resource officer to make a presentation, a "half-day" which is common on testing days, a snow or storm day, teacher sick day, etc. You also can expect most students to miss a few days. Some students can miss many days. The total contact time then can then be greatly reduced. This would cloud the issue of how much time you actually really have to be prepared to teach. The answer is 180 days and 7 hours per day! As a teacher you should be prepared for the maximum contact time that you could possibly teach and then you must try to maintain as much contact time as possible and must keep students "on task" as much as possible to make the contact time you actually get a valuable educational experience.

If you only teach one subject all day, but to different students, you have to prepare only for that one subject, but you do have to have materials ready for every student you will have throughout the day. If you teach many different subjects through the day, you will have many more preparations and your planning will be more difficult overall. The good part is that you may find it more interesting to change from subject to subject. The problem might be that you will have to teach all the subject matter with the same intensity so that no subject gets less of an effort.

Now, finally we are at the point where you would look at only one subject that you might teach for one class period per day. This means that you will possibly need to prepare 180 lessons for one hour for that one class. This is a lot of work! Fortunately you don't have to have everything ready on the very first day, but you have to think about how big this task is and you must work at it every day. If possible you do not want to be planning on your way to school for that day.

The textbooks will provide the teacher with a lot of guidance and the outline of the course, but this is only the start. The teacher makes the difference in how the textbook is actually used and integrated into their plans. If a teacher develops a full hour of a very detailed lesson plan, that one day can become a plan for many years, but could be adjusted each year. If you teach for a few years, you should develop a resource file of plans you have used and that work! To do this for every subject is a very difficult task and it is why we should think about our teachers from time to time. Their job is not only difficult, but hey are also working with a precious group that will become our future citizens.