I'm only asking, because given the name Workload Agreement, it sort of implies
that we all agreed to something, and I must confess I must have missed the voting day
for that one. Or did we have one of those "consultation periods" followed by "union
negotiations", including my suscription money being spent on full page adverts in the national
press telling me why it's rubbish or why it's fantastic? And yet still I feel that I didn't
really have a say that was worth more than a whistle in the wind, let alone a box for me to
tick that said once and for all "I agree".
Now I'm not being overly cantankerous, am I? As far as I'm concerned, the Workload Agreement, which promises to reduce the administrative tasks that teachers have to carry out so that they have more time to get on with actual teaching, is an issue that never should have arisen in the first place. I'm sure my romantic notions of teachers from the works of Brontë and Lawrence were never tainted by their heroines sitting up by the flickering candlelight filling in forms with targets and levels. Surely the hard-nosed teachers in films usually starring Michelle Pfeiffer or Robin Williams didn't show the actors waiting for the photocopier or scrambling on chairs to dislodge a poster about to fall from its precarious hanging place? The only scrambling on chairs in Robin Williams' classes were to waffle some lines from a poem, if my memory serves me correctly.
Ha, I've just had a thought that has nothing to do with my original subject, but here goes anyway.
Has there ever been a film of the "hard-nosed inner-city ghetto kids transformed by an
equally hard-nosed yet inspired teacher" ilk where the basketball-shooting, insult-absorbing,
ever witty teacher has to get the kids into equilateral equations rather than finding analogies
between hip-hop lyrics and 19th century romantic poets? Just a thought.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, this agreement. Well, to cut through the hyperbole and 24 steps to recovery (or am I getting this mixed up with an Alcoholics Anonymous programme now? Although I thought it was easier for them - don't they only have 12 steps to surmount?) I'm going to tell you how the Workload Agreement seems to have affected me over the past year.
First up is the bane of many teachers' lives: the photocopier. Now, my school has always
had a reprographics department: two women whose lives are dedicated to stopping teachers
sneaking in at breaktime to run off a few copies of a worksheet they only made the night before,
and jamming up the machine with their lack of technical knowledge. But now the Workload
Agreement is officially in place, we teachers must not waste our precious time doing our
own photocopying. Now for most people this is no problem at all. Just fill in the reprographics
department's forms, leave the work in a tray, and then go and pick it up four days later. No
need to worry about finding coloured paper, getting it stapled, folded, or enlarged.
Herein lies my first problem though. Or problems, rather. On the one hand, I am organised
and efficient. I like everything to be done properly, some might even say to control-freakish
levels. So to leave the photocopying to somebody else is a bit of a wrench. I've had my share
of bad experiences before. The wrong pages copied, the wrong order, the wrong size paper.
The pictures that are reproduced so darkly they look like the toner was sick on the paper.
The copies with edges chopped off so that we have to guess the first word of every line. So
excuse me if I'd rather do the job myself. Yes, it is time-consuming. But so is dealing with
the consequences of a bad photocopying job.
Another concern with photocopying is the foresight it involves. Sometimes I am not so
organised. Sometimes I am spontaneous. Sometimes I have a lesson where the kids don't understand
straight away, and I have to change my plans for the following lesson to reinforce a point.
Or the opposite of this: some of the kids whizz through the work and I need to produce
some differentiated worksheets for the next lesson. Which is tomorrow. And not four days later,
which would be the first opportunity I could pick up anything I left for photocopying if I did
it the proper way. So thank you for the Workload Agreement, for trying to reduce my problems,
but now I just have to get up half an hour earlier to get into school before the reprographics
ladies block my way to the photocopier.
The second point can be dealt with more briefly: wall displays. Apparently we teachers
should not be wasting our time sorting out work to stick on walls, producing informative
posters, or sticking in drawing pins to replace those that have been stolen. This is now
the jurisdiction of LSAs or Teaching Assistants. But from what I've heard they are going to
have a battle on their hands wrestling away the blu-tack from those teachers who enjoy
making planets out of tin foil and displaying the vocabulary they know that their classes
need to see. The chance to be creative in teaching is slipping down the plug-hole, and this
is one of the last ways for teachers to shape their environment and insert some individuality
into a job that otherwise stifles opportunities to be creative by demanding adherence to
an uninspiring curriculum.
The last point that has affected me personally is much more positive. My free periods
generally now stay that way. I can only be taken for cover once a fortnight! No
more vindictiveness from the cover-generating computer, who sees my days off on a course
as shirking and strikes back with five cover sessions in a row! Haha, take that you bitter
computer! Now if I'm sick I don't have to worry about battling in when I feel like death warmed
up slightly, paranoid that otherwise my colleagues will hate me for leaving them with
my messy desk and classes from hell: chances are that a supply teacher will get an extra day's
work instead. Of course, how the school can afford to employ more supply teachers is
something I don't want to think about right now. I'll notice soon enough when my teaching
classes number over 40 pupils instead of the 30-plus pupils that currently squeeze in.
So, as for the Workload Agreement, I now wonder what further effects this will have on me, the bog-standard classroom teacher.
added 3/10/04
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