257. Worth It or Not Worth It: Stop Wasting Your Time as a Teacher

Teaching to the TOP

Teaching on the Double

Parenting, Education, Self-improvement, Kids & Family

4.8 • 667 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As teachers, our time is divided among lesson planning, grading, meetings, emails, prepping materials, and more. But not every task is equally valuable! We’re breaking down common teaching tasks and deciding if they deserve our time or if they’re just distractions. So in today’s episode, we’re putting teacher tasks under the microscope to ask one BIG question: 🧐 Is it worth it or not worth it? 🧐 As teachers, our time is divided among lesson planning, grading, meetings, emails, prepping materials, and more. But not every task is equally valuable! We’re breaking down common teaching tasks and deciding if they deserve our time or if they’re just distractions. 📌 In This Episode, We Discuss: 🔹 The reality of being pulled in a million directions as a teacher.🔹 The "juice worth the squeeze" mindset—does the time spent match the impact?🔹 Our honest takes on whether these tasks are "Worth It" or "Not Worth It":✅ Displaying student work (bulletin boards, hallways, etc.)✅ Creating seasonal classroom displays & decor✅ Keeping a data binder✅ Sending a weekly newsletter to families✅ Writing comments on report cards✅ Putting stickers on student papers✅ Scrolling Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok for ideas✅ Creating new centers/stations for each unit vs. reusing them✅ Collecting graded assignments✅ Accompanying resources for curriculums 💡 Some of our answers may surprise you! SUBMIT YOUR TIME SUCKING HURDLE! We want to know what is sucking up all of your time either as a teacher or just a person. Head over to our website and submit your TSH so that you can have a chance to be featured on the podcast! SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW Are you subscribed to our podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe to iTunes! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, We would be really grateful if you left us a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find our podcast and they’re also fun for us to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let us know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, hello there, top teachers. We are your hosts, Michelle Emerson and Bridget Spackman, and we are here to make
0:06.9	your life easier by helping you master your time, organization, and productivity as a teacher.
0:12.0	In this episode, we're going to play a little game, although that might be overselling it.
0:16.8	I am titling this, worth it or not worth it. So kind of like deal or no deal.
0:22.7	I've seen where people have done this as like overrated or underrated.
0:28.1	And so you like take a topic and you talk about whether you think it's overrated or you think it's underrated.
0:33.5	But for this, I'm going to share different kind of categories or tasks.
0:39.1	And we're going to talk about whether we think it's worth your time as a teacher or not
0:43.4	worth your time as a teacher.
0:45.1	Ooh, I love this idea.
0:46.4	Okay.
0:46.7	This sounds fun.
0:47.4	Well, go ahead and take your sip of water because Bridget just opened a bottle of water
0:52.1	and went to take a sip.
0:53.4	I'm going to kind of change things up.
0:55.5	I feel like most of the weeks, when it's my turn to lead an episode, I share a personal
1:00.9	TSAH.
1:01.8	And then when it's your turn to lead an episode, you tend to have TSHs that have been submitted,
1:07.0	which is a lot of fun.
1:08.2	But I want to know your TSA because I feel like you have not shared a TSAH in a while.
1:14.2	Yes, I caught on to that.
1:16.3	Well, that's because I feel like my TSAHs are lame.
	...

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