Every day I notice, read, and often print out a featured recipe in the New York Times. Today it was an amended recipe for no knead bread. One of the first things I look at is the prescribed preparation steps and the time it takes to prepare a recipe for serving at the table. Prep steps and time are non-negotiable.
It is August and for public school classroom teachers the August itch has begun. The itch is the realization that the number of days until the first day of school is decreasing and it is time to prepare to teach. As the days pass, the itch becomes more severe. For some, there is remorse over the end of the summer vacation and a return-to-work life. Others appreciate the natural cycle of classroom teaching – teach for nine months, not teach for two months – and prepare to teach for the first month of school. For all teachers, there is a tipping day, the day they awake and know it is time to prepare.
What do we know?
For the uninformed, on the first day of school when a teacher and children begin their teaching and learning year, teachers do not walk into a classroom and begin teaching. They prep. The August itch is all about being prepared for the first day and week of teaching. Or being ready to teach the first unit instruction. To be clear, for an elementary teacher readiness means preparing a unit in ELA/reading, a unit in mathematics, a unit in social studies, and a unit in science. For a secondary subject area teacher this means a content and skills rich unit for each course they teach; secondary teachers often teach two or three different courses every day. Every teacher has a lot to prepare.
Using the analogy to the prep steps and time for baking bread, research tells us a teacher spends 30 hours to create 1 hour of aligned direct instruction. Like bread baking, the creation of a lesson from scratch ingredients takes considerable time. The ingredients are the learning needs of each student taught, the curricular standards students need to learn, the curricular materials that support the standards, and the learning environment. Only beginning teachers and teachers given completely new teaching assignments begin from scratch ingredients. Veteran teachers have prior knowledge that shortens the planning process. But aligning preparation still takes critical time. Alignment is the key word because it means that teaching meets student learning needs and specific curricular standards. Unaligned teaching is like teaching to the desks in a classroom without students; it is meaningless.
Prep time for one hour of instruction is still a lot of hours, if teachers taught for full, uninterrupted hours at a time. They do not. In practice, most elementary teachers spend 15-17 minutes of each class hour directly teaching. Secondary grade level subject area teachers spend 20-25 minutes of each class period directly teaching. Parsed out, teachers commit about three to four hours of prep for each teaching day. This planning and teaching cycle, 3-4 hours for each teaching day, continues every week for the 36-week school year.
The August itch is the transformation of a teacher out of the classroom for the summer to a teacher back in the classroom for a school year. The itch, like a person awakening from a long nap, requires predicted scratching that prepare a teacher to do what a teacher knows how to do – cause children to learn.
Digging deeper – prepping the unprepared.
The August itch has a deeper meaning for school principals who will employ people who are not fully licensed to instruct children in their school. The predictions for the 2026-27 school year are that almost 400,000 classrooms in September will NOT have licensed teachers. Students in those classrooms will be taught by people on emergency licenses, long-term substitute status, or who are prepared to teach but not the subjects or the children in their new classroom. That is 1 in every 8 classrooms. Worse, almost 40,000 classrooms will not have any teacher because none could be found. Children assigned to these classrooms will be bundled into other classrooms.
Principals scratch their itch twice. The first scratch is finding someone to be a classroom teacher. The second scratch is helping that emergency teacher to be “trouble free.” Trouble free means managing a classroom of children so there are few disciplinary problems, communicating satisfactorily with parents, collaborating satisfactorily with other teachers, and meeting the school’s calendared timelines for grade reports and staff meetings. If an unprepared teacher satisfies these two scratches, the principal will consider the teaching assignment to be successful!
The itch for the unprepared teachers in these classrooms is completely different. Most of these teachers will be hired on emergency licenses. Their most valid knowledge of a school classroom will be their memories of when they were students. They will try to instruct children just like they were taught when they were children. They will mirror their memories of teacher personalities and teaching strategies. They “fake it until they make it.”
Some of these emergency teachers will be enrolled in state approved teacher preparation programs and will complete foundational education courses during the school year. They will learn to teach while simultaneously instructing children. Miraculously, this works. In fact, after two years teaching with an emergency license those enrolled in educator preparation courses will complete a valid licensing program and receive a professional teaching license. By their third year of employment, newly licensed teachers readily slip into the cadre of veteran teachers.
The Big Duh!
Preparation for the 2026-27 school year will make 3.2 million public school classrooms ready for 49 million children. In numbers only, this annual migration of teachers into school classrooms is ginormous. But it also is usual business for public school professionals. The public is completely oblivious to the August itch. Teachers actually go about prepping like any pre-season professional. Prepping takes time and effort, and it all happens invisibly.
Thank you, teachers for scratching your August itch. Thank you, principals for scratching your school’s itch to put a teacher in every classroom. Thank you, emergency teachers for answering the call to be a teacher.
Next August, we will do it all again.