WITH a working year only marginally shorter than that of MPs, who put in an exhausting 169 days a year, it is hardly surprising to find the teaching fraternity in East Lancashire responding to a survey with claims of depression, insomnia and mental stress affecting droves of them as a result of their gruelling working hours.

However, let those of us who do not enjoy a quarter of a year's paid absence from work set aside our cynicism and accept that when they are working, teachers do put in long hours -- perhaps as much as the 60 hours a week cited by the survey this week.

Let us, too, accept the findings -- based, of course, on teachers' own responses to the probe -- that on average each spends 43 hours a week in the classroom.

Let us, then, do some simple arithmetic and calculate that this total -- only an average, mind you, which means that some are at the chalkface even longer -- entails your average East Lancashire teacher spending eight hours and 36 minutes each day actually teaching.

Starting at 9 am and with no break for lunch, this means that the poor souls don't stop until 5.30 pm each day.

The mystery, of course, is where the kids are in this equation -- when most have gone home by 3.30 pm, if not before (and, by the way, what happened to the four o'clock finish that was the norm in my day?).

A lesser mystery is where the teachers are -- as my observations of staff car parks suggest that most teachers have long departed by 5.30 pm.

So what does this tell us? Either that many teachers cannot do sums -- as evidenced by the failure rates in maths by teacher training college entrants (in the never-mind, try-again tests). Or that teachers' complaints about overwork, stress and, well, having to work are somewhat exaggerated?

Or both?