The Trouble with Teaching

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.