One of my coworkers said something ridiculous the other day. Someone I know is applying for a job at my school – my coworker asked if they were interested in coaching anything (he also works in the athletic department) and when I said “no” he said “that's not good enough, if you want to work in a high school you can't just do 1 thing, we have a lot else that goes on.” This was like a personal attack (hopefully unintentional) because he knows I'm someone who does my work and then goes home at the end of my contracted hours most days. I only participate in things after hours that sound fun rather than just more work.
Credit to my coworkers who help out with sports or performing arts or whatever, but these people don't have any lives during the week. They work 11+ hour days (8 for the schoolday, 3 or more for sports/performing arts) 4-5 days per week and sometimes weekends for games/tournaments/performances. I had a hard time acclimating to working so much of my life already – 40 hour weeks are draining, let alone more. I'll be damned if I'm going to sacrifice more of my life so I can generate more unpaid/underpaid value for a school that would fire me in an instant if I truly expressed who I was (welcome to being LGBTQ in the south).
I absolutely hate American teacher culture where so many make it a competition to see who can sacrifice more of their lives, and for what? Our system is inherently designed to fail the majority of kids in life compared to what they deserve. I'd rather a school full of “lazy” teachers who show up and leave on the minute of their contract, but who are good at teaching over a school with self-sacrificing saints whose teaching is secondary to their coaching status.
On another note, a peer at a different school has a colleague with late stage cancer, overwhelmingly likely to be terminal, at an age where she'd be eligible for early retirement, who is still just working every day with no time off except for occasional appointments. She has money and dozens of stockpiled sick days – she doesn't need to work, but she's just going to work until she dies.
American work culture is dystopian, horrifying, and dehumanizing, stripping some people down to nothing more than what they do for a living. I strive to work as little as possible in life, there's so so so much more to see and do. I work to live, not live to work.