Anyone who thinks the Manhasset school district would benefit by requiring "a 40-hour work week from teachers, instead of the 29, 31 and 35-hour week now in place" (a recurring theme brought up once again at the last meeting), is only demonstrating his or her own ignorance. (And just where do those whimsical numbers come from, anyway?) Both our schools and our children would be shortchanged by such a mandate, since Manhasset teachers regularly put in far more hours each week. Let me explain:

To begin, a Manhasset teacher must be in school from about 8 a.m. until about 3:15 p.m., which constitutes a minimum workweek of 36 hours and 15 minutes. If you subtract the five daily 42-minute lunch periods, that comes to 32 hours and 45 minutes of work time per week. (I'm doing the math because it's obvious few of the critics can manage it.) Of course, I do not subtract time when a teacher is not in a specific class or has other classroom-type duty, because those periods are spent preparing materials for class, coordinating lesson plans with others teaching the same course, giving individual student help, correcting tests, etc., or in meetings with other professionals required for the special needs of individual students. (Did anyone really think they spent that time doing things for themselves?) That already compares favorably to the 35 hours of the "standard" 40-hour week that allows a full hour each day for lunch. And, frankly, most teachers don't even get that full lunch period to themselves, spending at least some of it, instead, with students or doing other work.

However, anyone familiar with even a single Manhasset teacher knows that they typically arrive in school about a half-hour early (and some even earlier), either to give extra help to their students or to prepare for their first period classes. Moreover, most stay long after that last bell has rung, almost inevitably to give more extra help to their students asking for it. That extends the weekly work hours in school to about 37, already above that covered by the 35 real working hours of the so-called 40-hour week.

But there's more. All our teachers spend many additional hours working at home, creating and preparing tests (including different versions for different class sections and different "makeup" tests for absentees), grading tests, papers, and other student work, and preparing other class lessons and materials, writing college recommendation letters, etc. (That, of course, is typical of the profession - at least on Long Island.)

In fact, the typical Manhasset teacher puts in more than 45 hours of work each week, at least 10 more hours than the actual 35 covered by that holy 40-hour standard. More significantly, all of these extra hours are incurred voluntarily, because those teachers are dedicated to their students (the children of this community) and to the ideals of quality education Manhasset has always claimed to espouse, not because they are mandated by contract - which they aren't. Requiring them to put in only the 35 hours of a so-called 40-hour workweek will mean their workloads would be reduced, not increased, and only at the loss to our students of things like extra help, special attention, college recommendation letters, challenging class work, and the like. So, all of us had better be careful, or those knee-jerk, short-sighted, uninformed critics pushing for that "40-hour" workweek just might get what they're asking for.

Paul Leone Peters