Would you like 14 weeks holiday a year?
Would you like to finish work at 3.30?
Would you like the satisfaction of shaping young minds?
Yes?
Well, you need to get yourself a job doing what most people think teachers do. For goodness sake though, don’t get a job in teaching.
It’s no accident that around 8% of UK teachers leave the profession each year, or that 1 in 5 teachers complain of feeling stressed. That’s well above the national average. Low pay is a fact of life for most teachers, and to top it all, the hours, contrary to popular belief, are often terrible, eating into evenings, weekends and holidays.
In short, teaching sucks.
The things that teachers commonly list as making their lives miserable are poor working conditions, lack of teaching resources, lack of support, stress, lack of respect, student behaviour, constant testing, and unrealistic expectations. So let’s look at them in turn.
Poor working conditions and lack of teaching resources come down to a lack of funding, and to be fair, if the money isn’t there, it isn’t there. Some people think that we could find more money to put into education if we stopped spending so much of it on nuclear submarines and politicians’ expenses, but clearly, these things are much more important than developing a literate future generation, so we should try to be realistic.
Lack of support is a particular problem for new teachers. In essence, they enter the profession with no idea of how shit it actually is and need help coming to terms with the fact that they have made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, the more experienced staff members only cope by growing a thick and calloused layer of ‘couldn’t give a fuck’, so they frequently find themselves on their own.
Stress. Apart from the lack of support, the main cause of stress among teachers is that they are assessed on what OTHER PEOPLE do. Those other people are either small children who couldn’t find their arses with both hands, or hormone-fuelled teenagers who don’t operate on much other than a ‘fight it or fuck it’ basis. Either way, the teacher is up against it.
Next on the list is lack of respect, and this may not be entirely what you expect. Having the kids respect you as a human being is one thing. Having the respect of the government that employs you is something else entirely. All too frequently, education is used as a political tool. Everyone cares what happens to ‘the children’, so making education reforms is an easy way to appeal to the masses. It really doesn’t matter what those reforms are either. As long as there is change, that seems to be enough. The upshot is that teachers are constantly battling with moving goalposts and little regard for their professional opinion. Unsurprisingly enough, that gets pretty old pretty quickly.
Student behaviour is a battle that is better not thought about too much. There is a law of nature which states that when 3 or more children are gathered together, at least one of them will be a complete wanker. From the early years, right through to school leaving age, groups of children are rarely much more than a pain in the arse. Factor in a few violent attacks on staff members, and you soon see that we have an issue.
Constant testing is a fact of life in most school systems now. We spend almost as much time testing children or preparing them for testing than we do teaching them. Frankly, it’s stupid and serves no purpose other than to further stress the teacher, and in many cases, the children as well.
Last on the list was unrealistic expectations. I once heard someone at a meeting say that all of the children needed to be above average. This wasn’t a maths teacher making a joke, it was a deputy headmaster making himself look like one. The notion that every child must succeed is very honourable, but it is also very unrealistic. There is no way that even the most talented of teachers is going to be able to get the moist, dribbly children at the back of the class through their SATs or end of year exams. That’s fine when there is only one moist, dribbly child in the class, but when the bulk of the class struggle to make use of their opposable thumbs, their teacher is presented with a very challenging situation.
You see, the biggest problem faced by the teaching profession is that what we do has a level of importance way higher than its level of difficulty. Educating the next generation is clearly a vital and honourable pursuit, but it isn’t all that complicated.
1. Find out what the students need to know.
2. Find out how much of it they know already.
3. Try as many ways as possible to help them to learn it.
4. Check how well they are picking it up every once in a while.
5. Try another approach if they need it.
Experience and training, teachers pick up a variety of different approaches to try. That’s how they get better at their jobs.
That’s it. It’s that simple.
The difficulties arise when the decision makers try to make it appear more complicated in order to make it seem as though they are improving the system. It is fair to say that most of the ‘new initiatives’ that come along periodically do little more than restrict the methodology palettes of experienced teachers, making it more difficult for them to do their jobs effectively. Essentially, they push the majority of teacher knowledge and experience aside in favour of what is usually a technique that we all knew and used anyway, but is now under a different name.
Naturally, when no improvement occurs, it’s the teachers that take the blame. In turn, the powers that be will buy themselves credit by announcing that they will retrain the failing teaching force, and the whole ugly cycle starts again.
Is there an answer? Well, of course there is, but allowing teachers to do their jobs unhindered would put the bullshit makers out of a job, so that’s never going to happen.
The other solution is to take the considerable talents that you have developed over the years elsewhere. Either go and teach overseas, where at the very least, you can move around until you find a system that suits you, or change your career. Ideally, you should do both!
