Disclaimer: If that title doesn't tell you that this may not be the most well-balanced of arguments you might try Reading Comprehension 101. This is me, letting off steam that one career path is given a curiously privileged status.
This video is one of a set on the BBC site: "I wanted to crash my car to avoid teaching" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-46738445/a-teacher-s-story-eat-sleep-teach-repeat 04 Jan 2019
Other titles include: Why teaching is making me ill (18 Sept 2018), More teachers seek help for stress (03 Sept 2018) and PE teacher left 'sobbing like baby' (17 Sept 2015).
*seething intensifies*
Stress happens in EVERY walk of life. The stresses this teacher talks of are stresses faced 24/7 by many parents - especially lone parents, and even more so homeschooling parents who aren't even getting funding for the materials their kids need, let alone a pay-cheque for doing the job.
You can argue that homeschoolers brought it on themselves but often parents homeschool because traditional schools can't don't or won't meet their kid's needs. I homeschooled my eldest after she'd been effectively excluded from the main body of the school because that was the easier path for them to take than to address the severe bullying she faced daily. I homeschooled my youngest because she was held back a year for being "too smart" to need the stimulation of being in the correct class. I homeschooled because professional teachers failed my kids.
*and breathe*
The point I really want to make is that teachers are well paid, highly qualified individuals with transferable skills. If teaching is so damn stressful change careers! Try being exhausted and stressed in a minimum wage job (7.5 years as a part time cleaner, struggling to keep afloat - 6 months of that homeschooling, another 5.5 years of it putting myself through uni in the hopes of a better future...yeah, that didn't work). Better yet, try being exhausted and stressed in a NO INCOME role such as welfare-dependent single-parent or full-time carer for an elderly & disabled parent.
This is how I have spent virtually my entire working life. I have virtually no experience, minimal skills, no savings, no pension fund...my degree is just a piece of paper. I don't have the freedom to pursue a better future. If I have a breakdown (as I have before) I don't get 6 months off; I've never even had anti-depressants. Why? The NHS has failed me for 28 years of mental health problems. One ex GP told me in no uncertain terms he didn't care about mental health, I asked for help so many times that the rejections mean I'll never ask again.
My kids already have these problems and my youngest is still at uni. My eldest just quit her retail job cos the stress is too much...fortunately she has qualifications and transferable skills. Curiously, she is thinking of taking up teaching.
*breathe*
Some people are in especially stressful public service jobs which deserve a bit of extra TLC - emergency services, air traffic control, ER staff, the armed forces... - but teachers? Maybe you've been lucky and had amazing teachers who've nurtured you / your children and done amazing things. My experience, my children's experiences, somewhat different. Some, of course have been good. A few have been very good. Most however, poor. Several, bloody dreadful.
Examples of our own experience include but are not limited to:
- Calling a child a liar in front of the class...because the teacher doesn't believe the kid is going to a particular place on holiday. Or, memorably, because a teacher decided what my cousin's wife's name was!
- Humiliating a kid in front of class for being illegitimate.
- Calling a child a cheat for getting answers right.
- Calling a child stupid for getting answers wrong.
- Deciding a child is a troublemaker because of their height...and then thinking it was okay to tell the parent that!
- Setting a class insane amounts of homework to counter the fact that the teacher just didn't bother teaching the class - literally sitting at the front telling the class to read in silence for the entirety of the lesson.
- Teaching a GCSE class one part of the syllabus only so they all flunked the exams...
- Dropping a GCSE class mid year (and so 'entrusting' their chances to the whims of various supply teachers) because writing a novel is more important than their futures.
- Calling kids names and making up nicknames for one particular child.
- Punishing one kid for the wrongdoings of the entire class.
- Punishing a child for being bullied.
Yes, I am 40 and my kids are 20 (tomorrow) and 23 (next week) so obviously a few of those things happened a good while ago but believe it or not many of those teachers will still be teaching; teachers in their 20s or 30s when I was in my mid teens would now be in their 50s and 60s.
In my years of education I had THREE really good teachers. And I went to four schools. Three. That's not a good proportion at all. Our kids deserve better and we're well aware that our cookie-cutter results-only education system is failing a proportion of kids that is scandalous. This is why I refuse to put teachers, as a whole, on a pedestal.
*tense pause for glaring*
Teachers do not save lives, they do not put their lives on the line. And the moment Ofsted 'threatens' to hold them accountable for teaching standards they strike! Yes, teaching is an important job but it's also, supposedly, a vocation. What it is not is a life sentence - you can just hand in your notice and go do something else if the mood so takes you.
With this in mind, why is the stress experienced by teachers somehow a special case? Teachers have it easier than ever before with classroom assistants (didn't have those in my younger days), high tech teaching aids, and (generally) far smaller class sizes - an average of 20.4: "...the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the UK had some of the smallest average class sizes in the developed world" (Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38506305) and the same BBC article - from nearly two years ago - cites a year 9 maths class of 46 students...but when my mum was in primary school in the late 40s, early 50s that could be the size of a single form, not just one lesson, yet somehow teachers complain more than ever about their inability to cope. WHY? In what way is the job really harder and / or more stressful than it was in the past?!
One of the biggest complaints of teachers seems to be that the poor lambs they're struggling with performance targets and reviews...like that's not a nasty feature of most 21st century jobs! For heaven's sake, I worked as a cleaner in a school and it was all regular reviews and performance appraisals! My last job came with a whole bunch of unrealistic sales targets - partly cos you can't make customers by crap they don't want and partly cos the town was being redeveloped and people were largely going elsewhere so as to have a less stressful shopping experience. Unrealistic pressures, unreachable targets are just a fact of life nowadays. Also gonna say that I was put in charge of a shop (against my will) with virtually no training and minimal experience. I still think it's a minor miracle no one died on my watch! Teachers are at least trained and prepped for the job they do...and they sought to do it and are (contrary to their own PR) actually pretty well remunerated for it.
I have struggled with depression virtually all my life and it is damn hard to see people act all hard done by for the career choices they made and could potentially change without much likelihood of difficulty. This is not to negate the stress they're under but I feel giving teachers some kind of special status it diminishes the stress suffered by others; their stress is not more important than anyone else's. EVERYONE who suffers stress should be entitled to support and help. There needs to be a shift in how we treat all workers in this country.
Even the headline annoys me - oh, so you wanted to crash your car to get off work? What about the emergency services called out to your rescue and NHS staff who'd have to look after you? What about the tax payer who has to cover your sick days, especially if you faked your injuries? What about the sub who has to cover your classes? What about the scare that'd give your students and the disruption to their learning?
INSERT HERE: I was run over at age 7,
my kids were at a school where a teacher died in an RTA.
At risk of sounding like a snowflake this is a really triggering thing to even suggest doing
to a class full of kids who might easily have a past trauma of this nature.
And more to my personal viewpoint...what about those in jobs where you're not entitled to paid sick leave? People who've struggled through incredibly painful shifts cos they simply don't have the luxury to recuperate. What about those struggling through life unable to drive and / or unable to afford a car? The sheer PRIVILEGE involved in that statement makes me livid.
Okay, so it's a wild statement born of severe mental distress rather than an actual action but all the same...
It will never not bug me that people who have the education, pay grade and personal freedoms to change their circumstances don't, and those of us at the bottom of the heap with no way out just have to make do. No one wants to hear about the stress of being a single parent, a cleaner, a sales assistant. We don't have the same allure, obviously.
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