There are many troubles with teaching; one being that it is unbelievably wearing, so that it is almost impossible to continue to do it over a number of years without being broken on the wheel of stressful inevitability.
In this, it sadly varies little from many, many jobs; 40 years of explaining to patients that they would be less ill if they smoked less and ate fewer McDonalds can't be much better, and spending that amount of time trying to stop parents beating their kids to death, or plodding gloomily after a bunch of thick but relentless miscreants who spray their names on walls in VERY BIG LETTERS just outside their tower blocks on breaks in between stealing electrical goods to pay for £10 drug bags must be equally depressing and demoralising.
What these jobs have in common, unlike working in the media, or in government, or even the high end of private practice, is that they are proper jobs, on the front line of "services", where you genuinely interact with the unfiltered public. The unfiltered public have not been pre-selected in any way; they are not particularly anything - except perhaps not the super-rich. It is rare to encounter Madonna's kids down the social. There is not much wrong with the unfiltered public per se, although a quantity of them are people that you just don't want to know exist, because most of the detectably bad are in the 90% of the population who aren't super-rich, and because (let's face it) nobody likes everybody they ever meet, and the odds of your enjoying their company is curtailed a lot by the fact that everybody you meet at work wants something from you. When you meet 180 of these a day who are short and shrill, plus a few members of staff, a couple of phone calls from parents, and the posse who want their homework back early or have been away and now demand you Help Them, you can feel quite tired by three o'clock.
And this is where teaching scores heavily on the "I'm fucking TIRED now, actually" o-meter. In order to survive, you must be able to ignore at least two classfuls of children a day. The other way lies madness. This is not what parents probably want to hear, but I doubt if they would like the alternatives better; for either there would have to be more money for schools (something some schools have done by directly charging a "voluntary contribution, which actually works well), or there would have to be and end to Equal Rights for the bone idle and disruptive - ie kicking out the kids who shriek, eat biscuits and text each other in class.
Meanwhile, the unions do not help matters by assisting the bone idle and disruptive among staff - those who take months off sick with very dubious excuses - to get great severance pay-offs, while doing little or nothing to protect the staff who are working, either from basic over-work, or from picking up the slack of their less conscientious colleagues. Again, there have always been work-shy lead-swinging skivaholic slackers, but that doesn't make it a good idea to encourage it.
Those foolish enough to carry on turning up to work are constantly expected to Do More and Do It Better, while having little time to do so because they are having to monitor their own performance in triplicate so that they can be told whether they are meeting the immeasurable targets set for them by people who know little or nothing of life at the chalk-face.
For this is the worst thing about teaching; you are Beta. Other people know better, and your rights are non-existent; you belong to the class to whom our society entrusts its children. Think about it.
Tuesday 4 December 2007
Tuesday 23 October 2007
Brand New Teach
Why is teaching not getting any better? What proves that it isn't getting any better? And what is Anybody Doing About It?
Here are some statistics to crunch:
teachers are paid for 1296 hours a year. Last year I worked a full year as a teacher, and this was deemed to be a total of 38 weeks, or 190 days. suggesting that a teacher's working day is 6.82 hours long. Considering that such a stretch would include a mandatory paid break of 20 minutes, this seems about right. A teacher's working day at the school where I performed my duties began at 0820 and ended at 1520. Again, it all seems all right.
Except that: between 0820 and 1520, the vast majority of teachers' time is actually "contact time" - ie time spent with children, either pedagogically or pastorally. Well, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be? Good.
Now, let's add on:
1 meeting (after school) per week - 1 hour (faculty, staff, pastoral teams)
2 sessions of marking per week - 2 hours
5 hours per week planning
2 hours per week filling in register returns / telephoning parents about their pastoral concerns / chasing children for their errant behaviour or note return
10-12 parents' evenings per year @ 4 hours a pop
Media showcase - 1 evening attendance 4 hours
School play - 4 hours a night for 4 night, plus two or three four hour days (weekends)
1 detention per week - 40 minutes
Report writing - 2 for each form taught, at 2-3 hours each (10-15 hours min; 15-20 max)
Departmental Evenings - two per year, 4 hours each
Year 11 ball - attendance from 7pm to 2am
Moderation: 2 meetings, 2 hours each - 2 hours preparation per meeting
Checking administrative errors - 20 minutes per report-writing
Photocopying - 10 minutes a day
Pity the poor NQT who has no lessons planned, no foreknowledge of events and whole school deadlines, and no time off at all, because s/he has to go to extra meetings. The one I currently see is working from 0730, when she arrives in the morning, until 1730 when she leaves. On this basis, she will have completed her yearly hours in April - much good will it do her. She will still have to work until about 24th July.
She will still have to put up with parents who will not accept that their kids are Bone Lazy Idle Skivabouts, or that they themselves have driven their kids to near-nervous breakdown in the short time they've had, and are making things worse not better. She will still have to put up with kids who swear, have paddywacks, and make utter tossers of themselves and victims of other kids. She will still have to listen to assessments of her teaching by people who don't teach her subject, and have no idea what her working life consists of, because that is how NQT assessment works.
She is at a good school, where expectations of staff are not out of line with government directives. The majority of both staff and children - and indeed, parents - there are kind, polite and decent. She is a good teacher. But why isn't it any better? Why do teachers disappear with stress for half years at a time? How much more of what we aren't prepared to pay the poor bastards for do we expect to get? I was shocked to read in Private Eye that a Healthcare Trust had asked its nurses to work an unpaid shift to help balance the books. But when you think that Miss Smith will be working from April to July for free, it seems that that's what public service is about.
Here are some statistics to crunch:
teachers are paid for 1296 hours a year. Last year I worked a full year as a teacher, and this was deemed to be a total of 38 weeks, or 190 days. suggesting that a teacher's working day is 6.82 hours long. Considering that such a stretch would include a mandatory paid break of 20 minutes, this seems about right. A teacher's working day at the school where I performed my duties began at 0820 and ended at 1520. Again, it all seems all right.
Except that: between 0820 and 1520, the vast majority of teachers' time is actually "contact time" - ie time spent with children, either pedagogically or pastorally. Well, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be? Good.
Now, let's add on:
1 meeting (after school) per week - 1 hour (faculty, staff, pastoral teams)
2 sessions of marking per week - 2 hours
5 hours per week planning
2 hours per week filling in register returns / telephoning parents about their pastoral concerns / chasing children for their errant behaviour or note return
10-12 parents' evenings per year @ 4 hours a pop
Media showcase - 1 evening attendance 4 hours
School play - 4 hours a night for 4 night, plus two or three four hour days (weekends)
1 detention per week - 40 minutes
Report writing - 2 for each form taught, at 2-3 hours each (10-15 hours min; 15-20 max)
Departmental Evenings - two per year, 4 hours each
Year 11 ball - attendance from 7pm to 2am
Moderation: 2 meetings, 2 hours each - 2 hours preparation per meeting
Checking administrative errors - 20 minutes per report-writing
Photocopying - 10 minutes a day
Pity the poor NQT who has no lessons planned, no foreknowledge of events and whole school deadlines, and no time off at all, because s/he has to go to extra meetings. The one I currently see is working from 0730, when she arrives in the morning, until 1730 when she leaves. On this basis, she will have completed her yearly hours in April - much good will it do her. She will still have to work until about 24th July.
She will still have to put up with parents who will not accept that their kids are Bone Lazy Idle Skivabouts, or that they themselves have driven their kids to near-nervous breakdown in the short time they've had, and are making things worse not better. She will still have to put up with kids who swear, have paddywacks, and make utter tossers of themselves and victims of other kids. She will still have to listen to assessments of her teaching by people who don't teach her subject, and have no idea what her working life consists of, because that is how NQT assessment works.
She is at a good school, where expectations of staff are not out of line with government directives. The majority of both staff and children - and indeed, parents - there are kind, polite and decent. She is a good teacher. But why isn't it any better? Why do teachers disappear with stress for half years at a time? How much more of what we aren't prepared to pay the poor bastards for do we expect to get? I was shocked to read in Private Eye that a Healthcare Trust had asked its nurses to work an unpaid shift to help balance the books. But when you think that Miss Smith will be working from April to July for free, it seems that that's what public service is about.
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