BS: why teachers despair and quit

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: meself
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 08:52 PM

My niece went from Canada to England to teach elementary school (or whatever you call it over there). It was a 'rough' school, but what made it unbearable was the endless meddling of and harassment from the various levels of authority above. Unlike a number of others, she made it to the end of the year. She decided that she would just do substitute-teaching the following year to avoid most of the BS ....

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Donuel
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 08:36 PM

Teachers are awarded when they train kids to win the race to the bottom of the brain stem. There is more to programming than meets the eye. It is true that politics is often at the root of this programming.

Physical brutality from below and emotional brutality from above leaves teachers in the middle, pitifully rewarded when they comply to teaching a mind set they may not agree with.

When a rogue teacher enhances learning with giving kids a virtual feeling of freedom the teacher is often not rewarded but is popular with the students.

Only teachers remember the special rewards that do exist. When my father received a rare reward he would beam.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 06:16 PM

Hoi!

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 06:15 PM

National curriculum, national assistance, national dried milk, national service. All of it for the riffraff, none of it for the upper classes. Note how the national curriculum never applied to the VAT-free, charitable status public schools, doesn't apply to the ideology-led free schools. Keep the hot-polloi in their place, eh? One rule for us, another for them...

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 04:09 PM

the national curriculum believed that children in infant classes(5-7yrs old) should be able to distinguish between classical and renaissance art.....!

The rumour was that Sheila Lawler member of the tory think tank would ring up the minister of ed in the middle of the night with some outlandish idea and he would add it immediately to the NC.

Eventually a reasonably sane man became minister of ed, John MacGregor. THe messages coming down the pipeline was that he had talked with teaching unions and agreed the NC was total bollocks.

within weeks he was booted off to become minister for Northern Ireland, where he had the job of defending demented tory policy over there.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Senoufou
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 03:29 PM

Not long before I retired, in my English primary school in late January, I was talking about Scotland and Robert Burns to my class of 8yr olds, and I mentioned haggis. Next day I brought one in for the children to look at (a real one in a sheep's stomach, not a plastic wrapper). I glanced at my timetable, and noticed the lessons that afternoon were 'The Abdication' and 'The Depression'. (National bloody Curriculum) I thought sod it, and during the dinner hour I cooked the haggis and the pupils listened to my rendition of Burns' 'Address To A Haggis' (much amusement at the strange words). I plunged a knife into it at the right moment then everyone had a teaspoonful to try. Afterwards we looked at a map of Scotland and they wrote some poems of their own about the haggis. This is an example of the stupidity of those who planned the National Curriculum. Eight year-olds falling asleep trying to learn about periods of history far too adult for them. No room for haggises!

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: DMcG
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 02:09 PM

While I hold no illusions about Mrs T and Mr B, the problem is older than them. In 1973 Alex Glasgow wrote a song that started:

Jack and Jill are off to serve
Their sentence in the child preserve,
Where iron bars confine the care they need.
Jack is with hia brothers there,
Thise baby boilermakers fair
And Jill will share the fate of her neglected breed.
This is where their world begins
This is where they try their wings
And learn that kings and queens are from a different mould.
Losig, as they always will,
Down the hill go Jack and Jill
Down the river where thwir mums and dads
Were also sold.


So yes, things have got worse, but no illusions, please, of.how it uaed to be.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: akenaton
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 01:57 PM

I have many friends who teach at the local secondary school and provide assistance. all complain about bad behaviour and the difficulty of retaining class control.
Today's parents seem more likely to back the child than the teacher when problems occur......I think it is a societal failing.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 01:56 PM

I think the problem that most young teachers have is this.

By and large, people who go into teaching are quite bright and have done well within the school system. Many of them have come from good schools full of highly motivated and capable pupils.

For many of them its a real shock to the system to meet the folks who take the Jeremy Kyle Show as a guide as to how one should conduct oneself in society.

The cane and the slipper has stopped working almost by the time I'd started fifty years ago, as a way to control the situation. the bluff had been called. Short of introducing capital punishment - corporal punishment was a busted flush in modern liberal society.

In puzzlement we looked at our fractured society - family life being the most moveable of feasts. We looked at the factories - in those day a worker at Jaguar earned three times what a teacher earned after three years in college. What inducement was there to be educated?

In truth - education has a less than honoured place in our society. We call people nerds. We burden graduates with debts. We make entry to becoming a doctor or a trial lawyer virtually unattainable. And we laud the vapid, the reality tv star, even the serial murderer, and the foul mouthed talk show guest in to stars of our firmament. faces in the news. Celebs!

In the Thatcher years, the whole education budget was blown on the right wing ideology of the national Curriculum. Schools became slums. I waas working in thos years in Notts and Derby schools. Every building seemed to have holes in the plaster. the books you used were ancient. In one school in Nottingham they had given up an entire room to SATs test papers, SATs marking schedules. Rewrites of SAT's tests, Re writes of the marking schedule. Re-writes of re-writes. The whole of a large room with high Victorian ceilings was filled from from the floor to the ceiling with bumff. No doubt some genius had been paid a fortune to nearly think that one through.

If a   child comes to school and finds himself confined in a slum for
seven or eight hours - what is he supposed to make of it. maybe it is the disruptive and the anti- social who are seeing things accurately, and they see the way society is and exactly how much it values education.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Senoufou
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 10:23 AM

I've always felt that teaching is truly a vocation. Some young student teachers that were handed to me to supervise were horribly unsuited to the job; they found their one hour solo lessons terrifying and disastrous. I also noticed the most elementary and embarrassing spelling mistakes on the board, and in the marking of exercise books.

The most important characteristic of a good teacher is the ability to inspire the pupils. Not just 'teach' them but to light fires of enthusiasm in them which burn for a lifetime. Young teachers who cannot achieve this become discouraged and despondent.

I do feel that a university degree is essential.

The environment of a school is very different from that of an office or commercial establishment. There is little contact with other adults during the school day, little opportunity to chat or interact. I think some teachers found that rather lonely. At least in an office one can laugh and joke, recount problems or exchange tales about evenings out etc. Being isolated in a room with 30 or so youngsters all day long is only for those who adore the job and find the company of students endlessly interesting and entertaining. Those who don't will eventually leave.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 08:58 AM

Bertrand Russell said that only the very best people should teach, and, once you've employed them, you should leave them alone to get on with the job in the best way that they see fit. We've had far too much of the media and politicians, ignorant about the issue, briefing against the teaching profession. Russell may well have been simplistic but his sentiment seems far closer to the mark than that of the current bunch of politicians.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Jack Campin
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 08:04 AM

Loss of respect for any kind of authority.

The study looked at that and concluded it wasn't a significant issue. The problem was the authority the teachers were expected to submit to.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 06:11 AM

I heartily agree, Al. Like Senoufou, I'm probably a bit out of date but I still know lots of teachers, and Mrs Steve retired only five years ago. Teaching needs to attract the best people and pay good salaries. The training should be rigorous and all teachers must emphatically be made to embrace Al's point no 3. The concept of "subject teacher" is fundamentally flawed. We are living in a world in which the danger for many children is that they will be mis-educated by the cyberworld, and teachers are ill-equipped to counter it. A good teacher will play a part in every child's emotional and moral development, and that should include every teacher in every school. The days of "sex lessons" by the school nurse should be well and truly numbered.

Good teachers don't need inspecting every few years by a bunch of ill-trained failed teachers. Good teachers don't need to be told how to mark books in what colour ink. Good teachers shouldn't be submitting reams of step-by-step lesson plans to senior staff who haven't a clue about their subject areas. Good teachers shouldn't be coaching their classes to pass tests that have nothing to do with wellbeing and everything to do with league tables (which should be banned). To be a good teacher you need plenty of time to prepare lessons, say 20% of the school day. There's something severely wrong when teachers can't have a lunch break, spend ten or eleven hours a day in school and still have to take work home and turn in at weekends and for weeks of the school holidays. If you think you'll get good teachers that way you're in cloud cuckoo land. Which every government since 1986 has inhabited, ever since that clown Baker, driven by that ideologue Thatcher who wanted revenge on teachers for daring to strike, imposed a bunch of repressive regulation on teachers.

End of rant!

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 05:45 AM

forty years ago, there weren't universties like there are now. so many people who wanted to continue their education went to teacher training colleges.

Actually that's fifty years ago in my case. the drop out rate was high, even back then. many women dropped out to have children - the average length of teaching career for a woman was two years.

many of the schools didn't provide courses of any relevance to what children needed. the discipline was harsh and when the school leaving age was raised to sixteen (ROSLA)- it was envisaged by most professional teachers that trouble would ensue. It did.

The things that have really made teaching difficult, i would list:

1) Education being a political football. Endless reorganisation. POliticians simply can't be trusted with education.
2) THe national Curriculum - the idea that there could be one curriculum for a country as diverse as England was obviouly nonsense. THe money wasted on that idiot project could have solved many problems.
3) the lack of vocational training. Education needs to have cognisance and care for the world children will grow up in.
4) Educational Gimmicks. the number of times i have been in a school where they have funding for Language DEvelopment or some such, but where the textbooks are thirty years old and older.
5) the dreaded inspection - the threat of which which seems to chill the heart of every teacher and head teacher.
I was a professional teacher in the inner ring of Brum throUgout the 1970's. i had to give up my career when my wife became disabled. since then poverty has forced me into various temporary and supply teaching gigs - sometimes when i shouldn't have left my wife. so i've seen the inside of a lot of schools.

it genuinely grieves my heart to see the lack of will on the part of successive governments. the endless pretence that the solutions are political, rather than professional.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Senoufou
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 05:43 AM

I should have stated above that I taught in primary schools and have no knowledge of secondary education. But my husband (who is a High School cleaner) tells me he has quite a few times found despairing teachers in tears, head in hands at their desks at the end of the school day.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Senoufou
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 05:39 AM

I've been a teacher all my working life. However I retired many years ago, so I'm not up-to-date with conditions nowadays. However, even then there were new problems for the staff by the shedload. Here are some of them:-

1. far too much 'accountability' resulting in endless forms, paperwork, assessment and documentation. This detracted from actual hands-on time spent teaching, and I suspected was never read or acted upon by anyone.
2. The National Curriculum. A stultifying teaching-by-numbers system which divided subjects into indigestible bites to be delivered exactly as prescribed, with no leeway for inspired teaching.
3. Behaviour and lack of respect from pupils. Swearing openly at staff, misbehaving in class, not completing homework, disrupting lessons. Controlling a class sufficiently in order to teach anything was virtually impossible unless one had a very firm character and much experience.
4. Offsted inspections by people who appeared to have little idea about teaching, and often little experience. They descended in droves (in teams of about twenty for our small primary school) and poked their noses into everything. One accepts that inspections are necessary, but these were ridiculously extreme and served only to unsettle and stress out the staff.
5. Entitled attitudes of both parents and pupils. One was continually challenged by belligerent parents, often rudely and without respect for our expertise and qualifications. Even violence was sometimes threatened.
6. Teaching methods involving group or even individual tuition in classes of 35. Chaotic and unproductive.
7. Salaries for graduates at a very poor level compared to other professions.
8.Extremely high stress levels resulting in exhaustion, breakdowns and sick leave, depression and resignations, especially from younger staff who found coping difficult.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: BobL
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 04:30 AM

Not a new problem. Forty years ago, my then partner quit teaching and started a new career in the ticket office at Euston railway station, where her foreign-language skills were from time to time in great demand.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: DMcG
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 04:07 AM

Apart from giving one off seminars to postgrads, my only involvement in education has been as a parent or pupil.

It is intwresting tjat one of the most viewed TED talks is on a closely related subject, which you could call the industrialisation on education. I have said before that we essentially have an induction system, (ie 'induere' not 'educare'); the whole testing and measurement is based on, and accelerates this. You can judge a person's level of knowledge and abolity in a viva/interview to a good extent, but it is labour intensive and therefore not well suited to giving lots of people a qualification. So thia ancient system.was replaces by written papers. Written papers were more efficient and still gave some scope for assessing individuality but of course lost any ability to interact. The latest major change on this line is the invention of the multiple choice paper where efficiency of marking os given such priority that any individuality of the child is ignored. Couple this with a desire for constant monitoring and assessment and you need the efficient marking system and as a direct consequence you need to ignore or at least give no value to the child's individuality.

Such a system is ideal for generating mass qualifications, but not mass education. Nor are the qualifcations themselves of much worth, since they do not measure the skills people need in real life.

And you don't need much imagination to see why professional teachers hate such an approach, and with great justification.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: akenaton
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 04:03 AM

Loss of respect for any kind of authority. (no one has the right to make me do what I don't want to)

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 11:47 PM

a nationwide focus on standardized tests, scripted curriculum and punitive teacher-evaluation systems.

similar here in Australia

How to stop teachers leaving the profession (Sept 2016)

Teacher's online letter on resigning goes viral (Feb 16) Graduate teacher attrition is a growing problem in Australian schools with up to 50% of new teachers resigning within their first 5 years in the profession.
For graduates the once stable, if undervalued profession has become increasingly insecure, with new research showing that the majority of new teachers are on short-term contracts.

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Bill D
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 11:43 PM

If 'good' teachers keep resigning, the ones who are left, presumably, will be the ones who don't understand what is needed and who don't know how to combat the dumbing down of the system. The result, slowly but surely, is like the not-so-funny joke about "how to cook a lobster"....put him in cold water and raise the temperature v-e-r-y slowly.... by the time he realizes there's a problem, it's too late.

What is needed is for educators who SEE the problem(s) to organize and protest in various ways...(yes, I know about unions and boards of education)...

Subject: RE: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Mrrzy
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 10:17 PM

Nice article, Jack.

I blame the idiotic idea that one should respect people's beliefs, which, when coupled with disdain for that there book-larnin, leaves one with ignorance squared.

Subject: BS: why teachers despair and quit
From: Jack Campin
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 08:32 PM

The research is about the US but it applies equally well to the UK. Both systems are being managed into oblivion by overpaid control freaks.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170406102547.htm