boothy wrote:
(if this sounds like it is directed at a person, it’s cos i posted it on squatjuice first!)
Teachers have had 3 years of pay rises below the rate of inflation. It is NOT a well paid job, yet one of the most important. The NUT still has significant power, and good on them. I don’t think this strike is unreasonable.
Also, for anyone who knows what the teaching job involves… do you think their day is 9-3.30 like the pupils? Do you have any idea how much planning and out-of-hours unpaid work they put in towards their job? They do it because they love teaching, but they should be paid fairly too!
I wasn’t some do-gooder at school. I was suspended over 30 times resulting in a 6 month exclusion. But I can still appreciate the good job teachers do, perhaps even more so after all the effort they put in with me.
Your thoughts?
I’m going out on a limb here…because I am aware that “teachers” per se are not liked by a lot of people that had a rough time at school.
Firstly I worked for 8 years in London as a teacher.
My hours for the last two years were 8am (when then kids came in) finishing at 3.45.
15 mins break (usually spent photocopying, setting up for next lesson)
Lunch ( 20 mins eating with the children, 20 min duty every day consisting of crossing duty, changing duty, shower duty etc… then i would be left with 20 min.. usually around 15 minutes every day for a coffee and a break away from the madness.)
After school you had to supervise late class or you would have planning meeting 1Xper week, staff meeting 1X per week also.
I would get home around 7pm each night with around 2 hours of marking ahead of me.
I would spend all Sunday (or all of sat if i was going out) planning my lessons for the following week, making resources needed for those lessons and catching up on making not finished.
The bottom line as a friend pointed out.. was that I was working these incredible hours. We tallied them up. Worked out I was earning £5 an hour.
People say oh well just don’t mark it all. YOU CANT you actually care about the kids… if you don’t mark their work how can you plan appropriate lessons and lessons that help them to progress??
People say just stop after so many hours… YOU CANT, because once again its the kids who suffer.
I personally find the UK curriculum stifling, boring, REPETITIVE and very restrictive. Lucky for my kids I am a creative teacher.. hence the making of resources and planning fun into their learning.
Most teachers I know think the curriculum SUCKS. We don’t choose what it is you know.
I taught for 12 years in total. Coming to Sweden has given me the break I needed. I feel so completely chilled out now, stress free.
You see on top of practically being a parent now to your class of kids because unfortunately (in London anyway), parents cant be arsed to read to let alone feed their kids. You have the whole aspect of dealing with parents who treat you as the babysitter. Who send their kids to school when they have been vomiting all night or have diarrhea so that everyone including the teacher gets it. And a lot of these parents were not working… but they didn’t want the kids in their hair all day.
Parents who verbally abuse you and bully you because the sun shines out of the child’s arse even though their child is the one with huge social problems at school.
There were many nights over those 8 years that I came home and cried. And then cried some more.
Verbally abused, bullied, pressure and stress.
I would say to anyone even thinking of going into teaching these days to think again.
Its not about the teaching anymore.
I’m not a parent. I want to teach. But I can’t do that when a child (or children) are violent, angry, upset, hungry, bullying others, being disruptive. You spend the majority of the time breaking up fights, disagreements, comforting upset children, being a mediator.
Schools are struggling because if it was only about teaching then there would be no problem.
And for the record YES we are underpaid for the amount of hours that are unseen by parents and the general public.
The worst thing I have ever had to deal with was when one of my parents cut up her children barricaded i her house for 3 days and cut them all with razor blades. The child I had a little boy… didn’t speak for nearly a year. How would you cope with something like that?
I have had drunk parents, stoned parents, suspected abuse parents.
I long for a class where I could actually teach and not have to be everything to everybody. The responsibility after so many years crushes you.
For every child that hated their teacher… I bet they don’t know that that teacher most likely fretted and worried about you.
Yes there are some shit teachers, there are shit people in all types of work.
But think about it.. I bet there was one teacher who made a difference in your life.
