Photo: Bob Edme/APIf I underestimated the anger provoked by Ségolène Royal's comments about teachers' hours in this post yesterday, I certainly don't any longer. First of all, a clarification: as a number of readers have pointed out, when I wrote that French teachers "work" around 17-18 hours a week, I should have said "teach". As I thought I'd made clear via a quote further down the piece (but obviously hadn't), their lesson preparation and marking takes place outside these hours and, as Royal herself pointed out, often at home.
As another of the teachers I quoted says, this is sometimes because French schools are ill-equipped to support teachers. Over to a reader from Saint-Etienne who emailed me this morning:
"French teachers DO NOT only work 17 or 18 hours a week!! They do 17 or 18 hours face-to-face teaching. They also prepare their lessons, mark papers etc... If French teachers were made to do this preparation work etc at school, the state would have to spend a fortune on computers and staff rooms in French schools, which might not be such a bad thing. As it is, teachers in France have to use their own PC to work on as there aren't enough to go round at school!!"
"You could have also mentioned that they are pretty badly paid, considering they're doing the basic job of preparing the country's human resources," adds a journalist at Radio France.
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