All work, little pay and no respect makes teaching a lot worse than cleaning toilets for a living
It’s a simple amendment with profound consequences. No corporal punishment at school leaves children with the responsibility of finding their own level of discipline and accountability. And as one can expect, the result is a circus of pandemonium and chaos in the classroom.
In my first week at a high school, I employed massive amounts of energy, charm and skill to attempt to manage my students. It appeared to work. My colleagues, who I often discovered in tears, even commented that they were astonished by how controlled my classrooms were. Except, the students were simply dazzled to see a teacher put on such an electric, high energy performance. It was impossible to maintain of course, and even if I had been able to run around the classroom putting out fires all day and being endless versions of Robin Williams mutated with Jim Carrey, they soon impatiently wanted to wrest back control so that they could do – well – anything besides being taught something at school.
Shakira Akabor recently wrote about the difficulties of teaching. I’d like to add my reservations about the absolute lack of discipline in school classrooms today. While I taught at a High School in Bloemfontein, one teacher commented that the children might as well be bricks, for the amount of quality teaching they made themselves receptive to. She said all the brick was required to do was be in the classroom at the right time. You could put it on the desk or on the chair, and did didn’t matter what the brick was wearing, or what it was doing. It could do nothing. It wasn’t required to do homework, contribute anything, not even bring it’s schoolbooks to school. Of course, the teacher would probably spend hundreds of hours yelling, pleading and cajoling the brick, but the brick wouldn’t do anything because it didn’t have to (meaning, it couldn’t be forced to do anything, so it did the minimum). Even so, the brick would get through school because the system is designed to pass – eventually – even the most ineffectual student.
Conditions are such in schools that the student has all the rights in the world, the benefit of the doubt in any important disciplinary finding, and virtually no accountability or need to be accountable (for lack of effort, lack of manners etc). Meanwhile, the teacher has no rights in terms of the student, other than to request that others treat the teacher with respect. It’s laughable because there’s an ongoing ignorance of the teacher’s role, and even though the teacher is required to fill in disciplinary reports, these merely fill up a file, and at worst, the student is brought in for a long conversation. The teacher is extraneous except as a filer, marker, converter of marks – basically an administrator of paper, and a part time stand-up comic. Not that a teacher is funny at all, but he is supposed to stand up and in the ordinary scheme of things can reasonably expect to be ignored, ridiculed, laughed at, threatened, mocked etc. In effect, nothing can be done to enforce the rights of anyone other than the student, and expulsion is virtually unheard of (because after all, now some other school must accept the child).
The physical experience of teaching is something like having one’s lifeblood drained out of you. Imagine having to spend the day yelling at brats who simply do not listen. Not listening may sound like a mild problem, but what it really entails is this: kids who enter and leave the classroom at will (they enjoy being sent out), are constantly distracted by cellphones, gambling, food, habitually throwing things out of windows, who blatantly cheat in tests, who choose to sit in a different seat every day, and try to deceive you for as long as possible about their true identity (answering to someone else’s name, refusing to answer their own name, not doing their own filing, not doing homework). Students also bunk classes by having other kids answer to their names, and by temporarily sitting in another teacher’s class (to avoid writing a test etc). Especially where 95% of the students are black, it is at first very difficult to learn student’s names, or faces, and to keep track of what is really happening (as opposed to what they are telling you is happening).
It’s soul destroying to spend each day shouting across an educational message, while circumstances are being engineered to interfere with this simple activity. It is a setup designed to make the teacher feel increasingly:
- helpless
-frustrated
-desperate
-useless
-angry
What’s more, teachers don’t have the afternoons off, or month long holidays to recover from their daily term time ordeals. Teaching probably has the most unpaid overtime of any job. As the holidays approach, the potential workload triples or worse, as exam papers follow tests, and masses of information have to be converted and entered into a database.
Then there’s the chore of filing, and of going through all the exceptions, all those students who failed tests, or bunked tests, or were absent. These tests have to be retaken, memos excavated for more marking. Then there are the exam papers. The nightmare of marking exam papers is hard to do justice to. There are unending piles of booklets. Each one can take from 5 minutes to 30 minutes or more to mark, depending on content. These marks have to converted and filed once again.
The entire process is even more defeating when one remembers the students they are being done for (or on behalf of). A bunch of self-centred, self ingratiating, self indulgent, ungrateful youngsters who are concerned only about:
- appearance
- things (like cellphones and clothes)
The number of meetings and training courses teachers are required to go on beyond the filing of hundreds of student files (in the abandoned hollows of a classroom filled with lolly pop sticks, orange peels, crushed cheese crisps and soggy balls of mucous soaked toilet paper) is heartbreaking.
If the above is your lot, and you live in the school hostel, and have to do duty, you have virtually no life, or free time of your own. Often when you are not on duty, you might be called to supervise the punishment of a group of children (for example spending your Saturday morning watching kids shovel dirt over a garden), or spend a Sunday afternoon taking a child to hospital (after stubbing off a toenail in the chase to get to the lunch table first). Although I have incredible awe for teachers who have remained in the profession for say, 10 years, or 20 years, I honestly don’t know how or why they do it in the first place. Are they gluttons for punishment, or Saints? South Africa needs something like 30 000 teachers. Don’t ask me! I don’t care what the salary is, nothing will get me to sign up to kill my own spirit. To teach is to live each day through hell and torture. If I had the option, I’d sign up for Iraq first. Seriously.
It’s a simple amendment with profound consequences. No corporal punishment at school leaves children with the responsibility of finding their own level of discipline and accountability. And as one can expect, the result is a circus of pandemonium and chaos in the classroom.
In my first week at a high school, I employed massive amounts of energy, charm and skill to attempt to manage my students. It appeared to work. My colleagues, who I often discovered in tears, even commented that they were astonished by how controlled my classrooms were. Except, the students were simply dazzled to see a teacher put on such an electric, high energy performance. It was impossible to maintain of course, and even if I had been able to run around the classroom putting out fires all day and being endless versions of Robin Williams mutated with Jim Carrey, they soon impatiently wanted to wrest back control so that they could do – well – anything besides being taught something at school.
Shakira Akabor recently wrote about the difficulties of teaching. I’d like to add my reservations about the absolute lack of discipline in school classrooms today. While I taught at a High School in Bloemfontein, one teacher commented that the children might as well be bricks, for the amount of quality teaching they made themselves receptive to. She said all the brick was required to do was be in the classroom at the right time. You could put it on the desk or on the chair, and did didn’t matter what the brick was wearing, or what it was doing. It could do nothing. It wasn’t required to do homework, contribute anything, not even bring it’s schoolbooks to school. Of course, the teacher would probably spend hundreds of hours yelling, pleading and cajoling the brick, but the brick wouldn’t do anything because it didn’t have to (meaning, it couldn’t be forced to do anything, so it did the minimum). Even so, the brick would get through school because the system is designed to pass – eventually – even the most ineffectual student.
Conditions are such in schools that the student has all the rights in the world, the benefit of the doubt in any important disciplinary finding, and virtually no accountability or need to be accountable (for lack of effort, lack of manners etc). Meanwhile, the teacher has no rights in terms of the student, other than to request that others treat the teacher with respect. It’s laughable because there’s an ongoing ignorance of the teacher’s role, and even though the teacher is required to fill in disciplinary reports, these merely fill up a file, and at worst, the student is brought in for a long conversation. The teacher is extraneous except as a filer, marker, converter of marks – basically an administrator of paper, and a part time stand-up comic. Not that a teacher is funny at all, but he is supposed to stand up and in the ordinary scheme of things can reasonably expect to be ignored, ridiculed, laughed at, threatened, mocked etc. In effect, nothing can be done to enforce the rights of anyone other than the student, and expulsion is virtually unheard of (because after all, now some other school must accept the child).
The physical experience of teaching is something like having one’s lifeblood drained out of you. Imagine having to spend the day yelling at brats who simply do not listen. Not listening may sound like a mild problem, but what it really entails is this: kids who enter and leave the classroom at will (they enjoy being sent out), are constantly distracted by cellphones, gambling, food, habitually throwing things out of windows, who blatantly cheat in tests, who choose to sit in a different seat every day, and try to deceive you for as long as possible about their true identity (answering to someone else’s name, refusing to answer their own name, not doing their own filing, not doing homework). Students also bunk classes by having other kids answer to their names, and by temporarily sitting in another teacher’s class (to avoid writing a test etc). Especially where 95% of the students are black, it is at first very difficult to learn student’s names, or faces, and to keep track of what is really happening (as opposed to what they are telling you is happening).
It’s soul destroying to spend each day shouting across an educational message, while circumstances are being engineered to interfere with this simple activity. It is a setup designed to make the teacher feel increasingly:
- helpless
-frustrated
-desperate
-useless
-angry
What’s more, teachers don’t have the afternoons off, or month long holidays to recover from their daily term time ordeals. Teaching probably has the most unpaid overtime of any job. As the holidays approach, the potential workload triples or worse, as exam papers follow tests, and masses of information have to be converted and entered into a database.
Then there’s the chore of filing, and of going through all the exceptions, all those students who failed tests, or bunked tests, or were absent. These tests have to be retaken, memos excavated for more marking. Then there are the exam papers. The nightmare of marking exam papers is hard to do justice to. There are unending piles of booklets. Each one can take from 5 minutes to 30 minutes or more to mark, depending on content. These marks have to converted and filed once again.
The entire process is even more defeating when one remembers the students they are being done for (or on behalf of). A bunch of self-centred, self ingratiating, self indulgent, ungrateful youngsters who are concerned only about:
- appearance
- things (like cellphones and clothes)
The number of meetings and training courses teachers are required to go on beyond the filing of hundreds of student files (in the abandoned hollows of a classroom filled with lolly pop sticks, orange peels, crushed cheese crisps and soggy balls of mucous soaked toilet paper) is heartbreaking.
If the above is your lot, and you live in the school hostel, and have to do duty, you have virtually no life, or free time of your own. Often when you are not on duty, you might be called to supervise the punishment of a group of children (for example spending your Saturday morning watching kids shovel dirt over a garden), or spend a Sunday afternoon taking a child to hospital (after stubbing off a toenail in the chase to get to the lunch table first). Although I have incredible awe for teachers who have remained in the profession for say, 10 years, or 20 years, I honestly don’t know how or why they do it in the first place. Are they gluttons for punishment, or Saints? South Africa needs something like 30 000 teachers. Don’t ask me! I don’t care what the salary is, nothing will get me to sign up to kill my own spirit. To teach is to live each day through hell and torture. If I had the option, I’d sign up for Iraq first. Seriously.
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