In celebration of World Teacher Day

 WTD JDI WILTY 

It is exam season, but this collection of letters is not a mnemonic for remembering first letters of quotes from a Shakespearean play or microscopic parts of a cell. They stand for the day celebrated around the globe yesterday and the title of this commentary (a shoe brand tagline and a UK celebrity game show).

World Teacher’s Day - Just Do It - Would I Lie To You?

The job has received a lot of negative shtick in the media over the last few years, I’ve added my pinch of pepper to the pot too. (See the postscript for a big grind!) But although the difficulties are real, there is still so much that is good about the profession. To celebrate world teaching day I thought I’d share a few.

The continuous cycle of growth is amazing. It is exciting to pick a vegetable or a flower that you have grown but seeing people grow in skills and understanding is miraculous.

Working with people who are all heading for the same goals, who are intelligent, funny and caring is a privilege. Staff rooms are full of problem solving, venting, creating, celebrating and hope – this is a recipe for fulfillment and fun.

Variety and surprise is guaranteed. In what other job can you use your analytical, synthetic and evaluating intelligence alongside artistic endeavours, game making, music and sport every day. What other job offers the challenge of pivoting to facilitate and leaping to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities every hour? You get to dress up in weird ways and make a fool of yourself in the name of engaging interest.

You know you have an impact on your society. Most of the kids in your class develop the skills, attitudes and care for community that keeps the country growing and sustains the privilege of democracy and freedom that we have. In what other job do you get customers coming back years later to thank you for what you did for them. In what other job do you get to influence and inspire our future scientists, writers, inventors and decision makers?

Personal growth and learning is ongoing and guaranteed. Teachers never get the chance to get set in their ways. Constant research leading to improvement in methodology is available. New resources and ideas keep you on your toes. New children every year means that nothing is every exactly the same or repeated. There is no room for boredom.

Oh the stories you hear! When I was teaching in the primary space I heard many teachers say to parents – If you promise to only believe half of what your kid comes home with I’ll only believe half of what they tell me. 

Here are some highlights in my career. There are many others I can’t share as they are as awful as they are funny.

• A Kindy kid turning up with her birth certificate to show and tell her classmates that the guy she calls daddy isn’t her birth father.  
• The Yr8 boy who told of his intellectually disabled sister escaping home, running to the supermarket, filling a trolley with all her favourite junk food and getting it home without anyone stopping her. 
• Another Yr8 boy who shared in homeroom how he had tried to use his ICT elective skills on his parent’s brand new Tesla and accidentally reprogrammed it not to start as a reason for being late to school – it took a tow truck, 2 weeks back at the dealer and a big lump sum to undo his genius. 

And you get at least a week in every ten where you can work in your pyjamas, you’re always free for Christmas and your after 4pm working hours are flexible.

Why there aren’t more people lining up to just do it – I don’t know.

 

Musicals are exhausting but so much fun.

Post Script – Long Rant – please ignore if not interested!

So what has made so many experienced teachers leave the profession and young teachers unable to stick it out; leaving schools around the world in a staffing crisis?

Here are the big four reasons that I think have made the job too hard, unrewarding and sometimes dangerous.

1.     Workload

Excessive data collection, compliance and performance transparency (ie. write down everything that will or could occur in any interaction with any student at any time) had quadrupled work load. This has been addressed to an extent in NSW and changes have been positive.

The change from hard copy teacher diaries to online learning management systems has added hours of work every week. These portals ‘open the school gates to student learning’. Everything must be perfect, on time and accessible. This means that all the normal planning and performance processes are still required (rightly so) but added to this are scripted explanations, resources, evaluations and assessments of a publishable quality shared with students and parents in a timely manner. This has forced many great teachers back to text books because the really good learning activities and experiences are organic – to meet needs as they arise, flexible and creative. This does not translate to the monster AI control that has straight jacketed teaching. And now management are screaming for learning to be more engaging. For many the hours of prep and resource development are then doubled by having to write up everything in parent speak. Just do it – and trust that teachers are professional and know what they’re doing.

 

2.     Parenting Engagement

Parenting skills that distract with screens, excuse unkind or aggressive behaviour, aim for friendship rather than guidance and even lie for their children to help them dodge the consequences of their choices have created a generation of children who are anxious because they don’t have safe boundaries, get incredibly stressed if their impulses are redirected and do not have any sense of self direction or responsibility let alone commitment to community. These are huge skills to teach but they must be mastered before successful focus on the literacy and numeracy that the curriculum demands. The lack of engagement and empowerment of children as a result of helicopter, lawn mover and delusional parenting is a major hurdle in their development of self discipline, resilience and GRIT.

Making the child believe the absurd images many parents have in their head of what they want their child to be is so cruel when reality catches up with them in high school. Parents can no longer pretend their kids are A graders by doing their kid’s homework, keeping them away from school on days they know there are assessments and complaining about unfair treatment or poor teaching from their primary school teachers. The years of lack of application and practice leave their kids wallowing in grades well below their potential with no personal skills to change it. This has created a large group of kids at school that feel like failures, don’t like it and lash out.

With the rise in learning delays and high percentages of neurologically diverse children in our classrooms, we have parents refusing to get assessments (long wait – huge cost) to enable teachers to get access to funding(hard to get and never enough) personalise learning effectively or have guidance for best practice in behaviour management.  Other parents can’t accept that in a classroom the rights of their child do not take precedence over the rights of every other learner. Very few schools have funds to employ teacher assistants which means whole classes of kids wait (loose the thread of their learning, get distracted, act out) as the teacher calms the child throwing the chair, ripping up their book, spitting, screaming on the floor, needing one to one eye contact to engage, who is upset because someone touched them... Very few schools have enough counsellors or space for withdrawal to calm down in a safe environment before they join the class again. Very few schools have access to the vast array of speech pathologists, psychologists, occupational therapists and other ists that could change lives if regular and routine access was affordable and available.

 

3.     Government Stuff Ups

Two of the worst things that has made high schools dangerous places to be in many areas were government decisions that went against the advice of their education departments. First requiring all students to remain at school until they are 17 years old and second dropping the School Certificate qualification. They then went on to strip the TAFE colleges of staff, space and resources so that those vocational curriculums have become less accessible. At the same time, the demands of Standard English and Mathematics have increased and the theoretical (cheaper to do) proportion of the vocational HSC subjects have increased; leaving kids who should be doing what their abilities and interests dictate are stuck in fruitless and soul damning academic pursuits. This constant whittling away at their self esteem (you try working your hardest yet still fail for a few years with your peers knowing every result) leads to the disruptive and antisocial behaviour that we see in the news today. If we went back to a system where a pass in the School Cert was your ticket out to a job or an apprenticeship or a practical course at TAFE that would lead directly into the trades we wouldn’t be experiencing the ‘skills shortage’ and thousands of kids leaving Uni with useless or unfinished degrees and huge Hecs debts. AND classrooms would be filled with kids in Stage 6 that were there because they wanted to be – 80% of interruptive and attention seeking behaviour wiped out right there. If the kids who struggle academically (this number is growing) had a short term and possible goal (2 more years at school seems like eternity when every day is exhausting and unrewarding) they would be more likely to engage and change their skill set.

I’m not even going to start on NAPLAN. (Improvements have been made!)

 

4.     Incompetence

The amount of awful behaviour towards children is a very low percentage in the profession but there are still adults who have no respect for others and choose to abuse those in their care. This makes every teacher the subject of suspicion for those that do abuse are clever and quiet and their victims are convinced that it is their fault or are so shamed they can’t speak up. This emotional incompetence has made many young men choose not to teach, has put so much pressure on teachers not to discipline, not to comfort that the job can’t be done. Unfounded accusations by disgruntled students are so hard to disprove and the dirt sticks. Damn every predator for the damage to trust they have done beyond the terrible theft of childhood and innocence they have committed.

Teachers work as a team. If one can’t or won’t hold the line on behaviour and values. If one can’t or won’t design learning to engage and inspire. If one can’t or won’t engage in extracurricular activities and add value to the rich tapestry of the school community – others have to pick up the slack. This is so much harder than just doing the right thing yourself. The tightrope of maintaining collegial relationships and harmony in the staff room and conveying expectations is a tricky balancing act. Having to do the work of others so that their classes don’t miss out becomes a cancer of resentment over time.

The other side of this is the feelings of a teacher who doesn’t have the natural instincts for the job; the layered, complicated web of teaching is so difficult for them. Whether this is because their training or ability is inadequate, the feeling of failure is the same. Kids can smell incompetence and enjoy the freedom from exertion it gives them or resent missed opportunities.

 

As usual the solutions to these problems all require cash.  As long as education does not make a profit, can’t be used as a tax haven or is belittled by those who wouldn’t be financially successful without their years at school; the problems will remain. In a country resistant to using recourses to make sure the future has a livable climate, to stopping the daily extinction of native flora and fauna, to listening to our tiny indigenous population, how does education stand a chance?