My understanding is that it's also often heavily weighted to the early years, unless you have someone else's lesson plans to use (and even then, you probably wa

My understanding is that it's also often heavily weighted to the early years, unless you have someone else's lesson plans to use (and even then, you probably want to prep and maybe do a dry run). Just like any job, if 90% of what you're doing is new to you or something you have to develop yourself if vastly different than if 10% of what you're doing is new or something you're developing yourself. Given the actual in class time doing the lesson plans is fairly static, that means the non-classroom hours of the day, or your own time, is what is required to make up the slack. I imagine teachers of fields that have lots of changes (or of districts or states that adopt whole new curriculums) have it worse than some others. At least if they care about doing a good job. It would be interesting to hear what your family members have to say about their first few years teaching compared to later years, and what period your memories correspond to.