Time Spent: The Forty-Hour Workweek

Abstract

Time Spent: The Forty-Hour Workweek Brian Manternach (bio) THE INDEPENDENT TEACHER INTRODUCTION Time is money, or so goes the cliché. We can spend our time, invest our time, and even donate our time. These monetary terms may serve as reminders that time is a limited resource—none of us is allotted more than 24 hours in a day—which may inspire us to use our time wisely. Or it may cause us to avoid needed rest and relaxation, believing that, unless we are working toward profit, time is wasted. For voice teachers, lines between time spent working and time spent in leisure are sometimes blurred. Activities that are recreational for most of the population can be occupational for us. Am I listening to music for pure enjoyment, or because I am exploring potential repertoire options for my students? Am I attending a show simply to enjoy an evening out, or in order to assess the performance of a client who is in the cast? Am I choosing books for entertainment and escape, or is my reading time consumed by pedagogic materials? Certainly, these do not need to be either/or situations. We can enjoy listening to music while still being mindful of how the songs we hear may fit the voices of our students, for instance. But listening with these considerations at the forefront of our minds can make it difficult to know when, as voice teachers, we are officially “off the clock.” One aspect of our time that we can clearly measure, however, is how many hours each week we dedicate to teaching. Knowing how much energy and focus is required for intentional, engaged, individualized instruction, is there a recommended limit for how many hours we can spend teaching before effectiveness or passion for the work begins to wane? Our culture has an established precedent of a 40-hour workweek. Does that model apply to studio teaching? If so, how many of those working hours can be spent in face to face studio teaching and how many should be reserved for all of the other work required to run a voice studio (bookkeeping, practicing, studio building, etc.)? This column is the first of a series that will consider “time spent” in the independent teaching studio. To begin, I will explore the origin of the 40-hour workweek, how it currently functions in our society, and how applicable it may be to studio teaching. I will also present data on how the number of hours worked each week can impact worker effectiveness, and how many weekly hours teachers in particular tend to dedicate to their profession. Throughout this series, I will examine how traditional approaches to the workweek may or may not be the most useful ways for teachers to spend their time. [End Page 629] “HOW AM I EVER GOING TO DO THAT?” Kari Ragan’s November 2020 NATS Chat featured an interview with author and voice teacher Claudia Friedlander titled, “Academic or Entrepreneur? How to Steer Your Teaching Career.”1 One of the first questions an audience member presented to Friedlander was, “How many hours a week do you teach one on one?” In her response, Friedlander recalls interactions with her own voice teacher, W. Stephen Smith, Professor of Voice and Opera at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music and author of The Naked Voice: A Wholistic Approach to Singing. “Steve is a machine,” she says. “He parks himself on his piano bench at 10:00 in the morning [and] doesn’t get up again till 6:00 in the evening, most days.” Although, she adds, “I understand he gets a lunch break now, sometimes.”2 She expresses how continually astounded she is at how he can work a 40-hour week “the way that you would at another job,” seemingly without succumbing to fatigue or any lack of focus. “He was always energetic,” she says. “If he was ever tired, if he was ever like, ‘Oh, God, I can’t do another hour of this,’ I never saw it, because he loves it so much.” She realized, however, that she could not replicate that pace herself, as she wondered aloud, “How am I ever...