I have worked hard today. And I feel guilty for saying that since I have been sitting on my arse all day and my father-in-law wouldn't find that an acceptable way of working. I repeatedly feel like I have to apologise for being a teacher, for not doing proper work. And today I wasn't even teaching; I was trying to help other teachers not be sacked for being ill.
It is emotionally draining and I am knackered after arguing over and over again that it is not fair that someone should lose their job for being off sick. This was all thrown into sharp relief by a programme on Radio 4 tonight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b055g8zh
This was File on 4 and the title of the programme was "Sick of school". It analysed the recent workload survey and commented on the number of teachers who are off sick with stress, it suggested that perhaps we aren't all whingers, that perhaps we do work hard, even perhaps, that no end of holidays can ever compensate for working 14 hour days, 6 days a week.
What could be even more frustrating is that I can't help feeling that all our hard work is somehow misdirected. Teachers work hard because we love our job and love the kids we teach but we are being held responsible for every aspect of parenting and education and there are not enough hours in the day. Students spend less that 10% of the year at school, but every new initiative seems to fall to schools. Sexting, religious tolerance, citizenship. And GCSEs. 3 levels of progress. Literacy. Prepared for the workplace. Any workplace. It no longer seems to be any one else's responsiblity to train teenagers. It's hard to know what else we can do. In an interview on the Radio 4 "Today" programme on Monday morning Trevor Phillips was being interviewed about his new documentary "Things We Won't Say About Race Which Are True" http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/things-we-wont-say-about-race-that-are-true
and made some really interesting comments. He said that it was difficult to get certain statistics involving race acknowledged publicly. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02m37ld
He said "The big educational success story of the last ten year has been London schools which used to be at the bottom of the league tables and now it's at the top...the high performing ethnic minority groups Chinese, Indian, African and Polish have exploded in numbers". He was suggesting that we could really learn from this and rather than see this as merely a correlation in numbers, explore the reasons for the good performance of these ethnic groups and learn lessons from them in how to achieve this success for all ethnic groups.
It makes me wonder if race is the only reason that this story hasn't gained greater attention from the press and teachers' groups. This also suggests that a school's performance may not be solely down to the teaching or the management, but may, believe it or not, have something to do with the social background of the children we teach. In fact, the family or ethnic background of the students may have more to do with the results than the teachers. Who knew?
I am not trying to suggest that all the work we do is without merit, we can produce all sorts of wonderfully positive effects, but I see my year 11s for 3 hours a week, and on Monday morning, one of them always stay in bed after a night of GTA. On Thursday afternoon; Neil always spends 15 minutes with his head on the desk saying how tired he is, 15 minutes longing for KFC and 15 minutes asking if we can watch a video. Sometimes he uses paragraphs and I want to ruffle his hair.
But that's the relaxing part of the job. I'd rather deal with an irrational 15 year old than an academy chain who don't want to pay middle aged women for their experience when they've had surgery and need a few more weeks to recover. That's stressful.
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