Sometimes people look in on the glorious profession of teaching with its short days and long holidays, and
wonder what on earth there is to make one of its number rant. “Go and stack supermarket shelves for a living,”
they state, matter-of-factly, as if that is a stress-free alternative. It isn’t. I’ve done that for a living,
and I have friends who still do. I expect somewhere out there you will find Ranting Shelf-Stacker, the blog.
It’s not that teaching is crap, it’s just that it has really, really crap bits about it. In fact, the job title
is a misnomer. If I were, as the name suggests, just a teacher, I’d love it. There would be no Ranting Teacher.
There would be blissed out laughing teacher for most of the time.
So let me tell you about why parts of the job can get your goat. They may sound petty, but so much time and effort goes into doing all the other stuff in addition to teaching that their ability to annoy is ten-fold what it should be. Here are three examples, which may be a retort to all those who wonder why I find my job high on the Employment-that-pisses-you-off scale.
You spend your entire lunch hour preparing work for a supply teacher because you are being sent on a course
in two days’ time that you don’t even want to go on. Worse still, there’s no nice lunch to look forward to,
because the course is on home turf – your own school! But anyway, with much huffing and puffing, you clear
your desk, sort out class lists, write clear instructions for the supply teacher, organise photocopies and
books in a logical manner, inform the pupils what they will be doing next lesson in your absence, and so on.
Then on the morning of the course, you are told that you have been forgotten and that the powers that be forgot
to order in a supply teacher for you, so sorry, you’re not on the crappy course anyway. You may be thinking
what a relief, back to normality, but you would be mistaken, for the lessons have been planned and the pupils
have been prepped, and now you have to go and face the cries of dismay when the pupils bowl up to see that
you’re there when they were expecting an easy hour of winding up a supply teacher and listening to i-pods.
You tackle Mrs Awkward, the mother everyone fears, with tact and diplomacy at Parents’ Evening. You give
yourself a pat on the back, but only after wiping the beads of sweat away from your forehead. Mrs Awkward has
every right to worry about her son with his specific disabilities, but as he spends three hours per week in
your company and seems to be coping admirably and independently, you reassure her that her fears are unfounded.
You even go as far to say that to spare his blushes you don’t treat him differently to any other child in the
classroom: the whole point of inclusive education, surely. Of course when he needs specific help and
differentiation, then it’s planned for and provided, but the boy is happy to join in with the same activities
as the rest of the class. Mrs Awkward looks relieved and even proud to hear this, and it’s heart-warming when
the son calls out a cheery goodbye across the hall as they leave.
All well and good, you’re thinking. So why be pissed off? Well, out of the goodness of your heart, you research one of the extra resources that you mentioned in conversation. Mrs A had looked interested and keen to find out more ways to help her son. Next time you teach him, you write down your findings for him to take home to his mother. It’s the next lesson, when he trots up with a letter from home, which lambastes you for suggesting something so expensive, and something which surely the school should provide for her son if it’s so important (it isn’t), that you look at the boy with renewed sympathy for having such a harridan for a mother.
You spend every week night writing reports. You use formative assessments, CATs scores, targets, class grades and your in-depth knowledge of the children’s achievements and attitudes in your subject and lessons. You manage to summarise their achievements in just a few lines, as required, and choose between the five available grades for each child.
Reason to be pissed off here: the pastoral head comes to see you about one of your reports for one of the
pupils, to ask you to rewrite it because the grades are too low. Do you know why the grades are low? Because
the child cannot read or write. Because the child is incapable of being classed as “average”, which is the
grade with which you are being asked to reclassify the child. It’s not done out of spite, but rather because
you would rather the parents know honestly how their child is doing than give them false expectations, and
because you are expected to use all five grades to show the spread of ability. But no, this is not good
enough. For some reason it is thought that being honest with the child’s parents is not a good idea. And so
you are forced to put your name to something that you don’t believe in. What a load of bollocks.
added 25/02/07
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