Australia's Science Forum

For a school with roughly 1100 students and 10 science teachers and if you are the only lab tech on site you have your work cut out for yourself. Is there another labbie to help with the workload? How many laboratories do you have to look after and how many prep rooms? I hope your science department is well funded to cope with the amount of equipment that you would need to keep all these pracs running smoothly. Also hope you have a decent dishwasher or two to cope with cleaning the glassware.

we have 6 labs and one lecture/dem room, 3 prep rooms. I have some help on a Thursday and Friday from a casual -so that helps clean up and prepare for the next week. I have two dishwashers, one on one side of the campus and one on the other, our labs are split which makes for a lot of steps some days Equipment has to be shared and scheduled well. Like all of you we have to be very organised.

Carolyn - that's a lot. I would hope that your teachers order with plenty of notice. I'd hate to be getting last minute orders in that situation! I have worked with 5 labs and 7 teachers, about 1100 students from 7 to 12 and no extra help plus, I was only 35 hours a week. It was all okay if things were ordered on time, and no one expected anything extra, but throw in open days, titration and lots of late prac orders and I would fall in a heap.
My life is quite different now - I have the time to do things properly without rushing and making mistakes. So blessed.

Our school is about 1100 students k-12. We have 2 campuses, 8 labs and 15 science teachers and i just worked out that we have average 33 pracs a week this last year. I work yr 11/12 campus and the absolute maximum pracs I could have a day would be 20. I never get this, I probably average 3-5 per day. Our 7-10 campus would average around 10 a day. A busy day over there would be up to 20. A lot of these would be the same prac repeated across the year group (4 streams) where as mine will generally be individual pracs as it is rare for my multiples to be on the same day.

Linotas, my record number of pracs for one day is 26 at the moment..it got a bit much - especially if its on a day I'm by myself so my HT has set a rule that we can have no more then 15 per day. Today for example I have 13 - constant but possible. We are busy people us Labbies

I kept stats for last year i did over 1363 in the year
T1 485 avg 10 / day
T2 361 avg 7 / day
T3 316 avg 7 / day
T4 201 avg 5 / day

Term one is a killer cause on top of that you are negotiating new teachers, longer term, uncertainty sometimes, always late pracs ..

Lorikeet wrote: ↑22 Nov 2018, 09:37 I kept stats for last year i did over 1363 in the year
T1 485 avg 10 / day
T2 361 avg 7 / day
T3 316 avg 7 / day
T4 201 avg 5 / day

Term one is a killer cause on top of that you are negotiating new teachers, longer term, uncertainty sometimes, always late pracs ..

Hi Kate,

Good idea I think I might keep some stats of my own next year.

Its helpful to know when you schedule things like maintenance, etc ... definitely NOT in term 1 ...