I think the stress of teaching comes not from the targets and deadlines;these are part and parcel of most jobs, but rather from the completely unpredictable nature of the job. I am a successful and highly-regarded secondary school teacher with more than 30 years of experience. I plan all my lessons to challenge and engage my pupils and mark their books thoroughly and regularly but this is not the exhausting and stressful part of my job, as this is what I am paid to do. I am very resilient and certainly not weak but my job exhausts me because from the minute I arrive in the morning until The pupils leave ( approx 7 hours) I have only 20 minutes in which to use the toilet, make and consume a drink and eat. The rest of the time I am with pupils or trying to photocopy. I teach in an inner city comp so whenever I am with pupils I have to be 100% on top of my game in order to maintain discipline. This involves being energetic, positive, consistent, funny, authoritarian, understanding, fair, scary and knowledgable ALL THE TIME!!!!! Teenagers are like wolves; they hunt in packs and sniff out weakness to bring down their prey. Hence, after more than 8 hours of performing at such a high level and the having another 2 hours of prep/marking or meetings I have little energy for my own family.
My pay is adequate for the hours I am supposed to work, but reflects neither my overtime nor my success rate. There is no opportunity to earn more through bonuses or overtime so pay us restricted.
In my school I am rarely verbally abused in my own classroom, although some pupils argue pretty much every instruction, however, on the corridors or outside my room I am frequently abused for asking pupils to stop fighting, swearing, truanting, smoking or whatever. This is the reality of secondary schools outside of the leafy suburbs! This is stressful on an everyday basis.
On top of this, the general public and certainly the media and govt seem to think that most teachers are lazy and stupid and that they could do a better job. This is regularly voiced and is very demoralising, but not as demoralising as being told every week to introduce some new-fangled idea to please some management type and then bring criticised if they don’t observe enough of it in your regular lesson observations, even though it is a pointless pile of poo that just wastes everyone’s time.
OK rant over! Teaching is not stressful. No one will die if I forget to mark a book but trying to contain a class of 30 hormonal 6ft teenagers, some of whom are semi-feral, or emotional wrecks, Oxbridge potentials, drug dealers, the loveliest kids you’ve ever met, refugees who don’t speak English, children with a wide variety of Special Needs, now that’s stressful. Teaching them stuff is a bonus😂