Teaching is a rewarding profession in itself. Who would not want to pass up the opportunity to shape future minds, helping them to think carefully about the wider world and create their own understandings of how things work? You empathise with your students as they attempt to make sense of what they have acquired in the classroom, but as they start playing around with their knowledge, you start to feel hopeful as things start falling into place (with a bit of a nudge), and once they start recognising that all this knowledge has been in front of them the entire time in their regular lives, you can feel their joy at finally coming to a personal understanding of the lesson material.
That sense of elation is one of the several benefits of getting into teaching. However, with news of teacher strikes back home in Australia, particularly in New South Wales and my home state of Victoria, there are several negatives within the teaching industry that have to be addressed.
As a person who appreciates life from day to day, I will be talking about time. As an educator myself, I will also try to explain things in a simplified manner that people can understand without worrying about most of the professional jargon.
Bluntly speaking, teaching is not for the faint-hearted as it is right now. Teachers do not simply teach the material - they have to research the lesson content and the required pedagogy in order to deliver it in a manner that meets their students current needs. If particular material requires a rote-style approach for a lesson, a teacher would need to figure out how to make that lesson more palatable. Likewise, if a lesson calls for a more hands-on and engaging approach, the challenge lies in planning the lesson sequence carefully to reduce disruptive behaviour.
We are barely scratching the surface, and reality is already laughing at the insult that “[those] who can’t, teach”, but I digress.
In the end, if we want our teachers to perform to the best of their abilities, they need to be afforded the time to be the best. Parents (and society in general) simply cannot dump an ever-growing pile of expectations onto teachers, only to turn on them if they simply cannot meet said expectations because of a lack of time. In an industry that has been relying on more and more performance data in order to inform professional practice, even a cursory examination of a single student’s classroom performance and academic achievements requires time.
Take that amount of time, and multiply it by the total number of students a teacher has to teach.
It’s little wonder that teachers are starting to become more vocal about the growing pressure they are under to deliver outcomes imposed on them by both the government and society. It’s a matter of “so much to do, so little time.”
The other thing that we have to consider is that teachers are, in the end, also fellow human beings, and are not machines that can be easily replaced or repaired. Teachers also have private lives that they are heavily dependent on just to unwind and recharge themselves mentally. Robbing them of that much needed time is akin to sabotaging a vital piece of machinery and, dare I say it, morally reprehensible.
“Oh, you’re a teacher? It must be nice to have so many days off in a year!”
Those off days during vacation periods, as you can figure out by now, are essential to a teacher’s mental wellbeing. In addition, there is still the expectation that teachers would find the time to further upskill themselves, and it is during those vacation periods that teachers are likely to engage in any professional development outside of what is deemed mandatory at the school leadership and government levels.
Throwing money at the problem without a clear aim is not going to help. Yes, an increase in wages will go a long way in acknowledging the effort teachers are putting into their professional practice, but it doesn’t solve the main issue concerning the lack of time that teachers have to do everything at work, let alone to have personal lives out of work.
Instead, why not use that money to hire actual teaching assistants to help the main teachers? As an example, as long as these assistants are actively helping out in the classroom, they are able to assist with any data collection and analysis, freeing up at least a bit of extra time for the main teachers to research and plan their lessons.
That would be a start - every single bit counts.
So, how will we be able to afford to pay these assistants? The answer is rather simple, but alas, it is also a government killer in particular western democracies despite being used to great success in northern Europe.
Solving this problem will require a massive change in the way people and governments think, but unfortunately, we are rather resistant to change. Teaching empathy would help a lot, but some people would flip out over the idea that they have been the villains in other people’s lives.
Besides, that’s one more thing that teachers would not have the time to properly teach anyway.