Why do so many people dislike the teaching profession?

[LucyLastik]

As the thread title asks.

I'm really interested to know where this negativity has come from. I'm suspecting Covid but if we don't get to the root cause of it, will the teaching profession ever be seen in a positive light?

Random musings...

I must admit I wasn't aware that teachers had a bad reputation. I'm sure a lot of them are very good.

My mother and grandmother were teachers/headteachers as was I.

They had a decent quality of life, got most of the school holidays off and worked 8.30-4.00 with a lunch break.

Sadly that doesn't reflect education today. Teachers work excessively long hours- in part due to increased IT (you can now work from home as well as school which makes it 24 hours a day) Ofsted, constant government changes, safeguarding etc. Technology means that parents expect you to be there 24/7 despite the fact that you are not paid for that

I don't think that many people work 20-30 hours unpaid each week (using official government figures) on a salary of £25k- £35,000 except teachers. Teachers are paid for approx 32.5 hours a week for 39 weeks of the year- everything else is unpaid. That is 8.30-3.30 pm assuming they get 30 minutes for lunch (which is rare)

Education runs on goodwill which post CV19 is in very short supply.

@whatfunwehave what do you mean teachers aren't understanding of others' reality? In what way? Yes we might have more flexibilities than others but how does that affect you exactly? We don't make any decisions around the length of the school day, holidays or wrap around care.

I think teaching children is a very important job but teachers do tend to complain about how hard their job is. Other jobs are also hard and don't have some of the perks that teaching does.

What on earth is a neurodiverse child?

Teacher of 17 yrs here, senior management.

Hope you don't expect newly qualufied teachers to know every possible medical condition presented to them. I personally teach humanities to 500 children a week, 16 classes of 30+ children for 2 lessons per class a week, 35 mins each lesson.

Once each child has settled/unpacked their books at the start of a lesson, then listened to their homework requirements at the end, i find i teach the class as a whole for 45 mins per week, then have about 40 seconds per child per week for 1:1 as i 'work the room'...

It is just about enough for each child to ask me 1 question a week, and for me to give a 20 second response. If they mis-hear or fail to comprehend my response first time, then another child misses their turn and has to wait 2 weeks for 40 seconds of my time.

It takes me to November to link faces to names of new form entrants... Let alone tailor my responses to special learning needs.

Ideals of hiw to meet pupils individual needs are highly commendable...but the timetable and logistics make it only a reality on paper, not real life. Ticks a box...

Having joined the primary teaching profession in the last few years after a management-level career elsewhere, I would say that there is a huge amount of work needed to achieve even a baseline of competence day-to-day. You just can't blag it or have an off-day (or even an off-hour) when you are in front of the children. There is also a constant sense of being observed and given criticism that does require a little getting used to. Self-reflection is part of the job and there is no lesson that cannot be evaluated and improved. We must plan for as many eventualities that we can foresee and then react calmly in the moment to the one we didn't. I wasn't and am still not an SEN expert but I have worked hard getting to know the individual and nuanced needs of the children in my class and attended multiple courses to give me professional support to do this.

Explaining that to non-teachers is a bit like parents explaining to non-parents what it is like, so the conversations can end up sounding condescending or self-pitying when there is a huge amount of joy and some perks to the profession (just as there is to being a parent.)

I only have experience in a few fields of work outside of teaching and I am sure (e.g.) hospital work is similarly relentless, particularly in some roles. There are also plenty of jobs where the hard work is not offset with moments of joy, laughter or perks such as school holidays and lovely drawings of yourself.

I have had a lovely summer with my children and that is the payoff for not being able to attend even one of my daughter's settling in sessions for Reception, or my son's music concert. They know this but they will still ask me if I can come, and that is difficult. I fully appreciate what I do have and encourage them to do the same. They also came in and helped me set up my new classroom over the summer.

The other factor in recent times is lockdown, during which the government and certain media have encouraged a narrative of lazy teachers having "two years off". Certainly many schools were initially unprepared and took a while to put online schooling in place - mine was ready to go from day one and we taught live from 8.45-3.15 every day as well as having a large contingent of vulnerable/keyworker children on site, but my children's school didn't teach live for the first few weeks at all, and then only one session a day, so I can see there was a big variance. The government could/should have redeployed Ofsted or created hubs to link schools together and share expertise and equipment access as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it seemed to suit them better to lay blame on individual class teachers who had little control over their school's handling of the situation. This has filtered nicely through to MN and other internet sites.

In all honesty I find the public comments one of the hardest things to take about my job because it feels like there's no way to respond without opening up a conversation about "who works hardest" and as others have said, it shouldn't be a race to the bottom. All I can say is that to me, being a teacher is a responsibility and a privilege that I take seriously and I have yet to meet a teacher who doesn't treat the profession with equal gravity.

See the thing is,we are aware it's the system, not the teachers. But its the dishonesty of the teachers in coluding with it that is so infuriating. If my NHS patients tell me the service I provide isn't good enough, I agree with them and encourage them to complain. I don't take it personally.

@MsJuniper , excellent post.

'What on earth is a neurodiverse child?' If you honestly are a teacher and don't know what a neurodiverse child is, and don't have the capacity to Google it, I suggest you resign straight away. Your pride in your ignorance is ableist and hugely offensive. You will presumably be sacked if it ever become public knowledge and rightly so.

@Diamond7272 a teacher of 17 years and SLT and you do not know what a neuro diverse child is?
How can this be?

@Diamond7272 WTF?!

@MsJuniper 👏

I honestly don't think someone should be able to go straight through the school system, to University and into the classroom. Life experience is needed instead of just perpetuating the system they have come through.

I agree with what ewecee said.

There is SO much whinging from teachers. We work the hardest, we work the longest, oh my god how have we made it to the summer hols it's been so stressful etc etc etc. This is my social circle as well as on social media.

Just seems like they can't read the room? Other people are streesed and overworked too?

I have NEVER had more than two consecutive weeks off work. Ever. I've been working for twenty years.

And I know the long summer holidays is justified for teaches but sometimes it feels like only they deserve time off! Six weeks would be heaven!

Education runs on goodwill which post CV19 is in very short supply.

^^

this is true. To ne noted also that's it's the goodwill of women. Nursing is the same. Not sure of the numbers but these are both huge sectors that are staffed by a vast majority by women. And it's been sold as 'kind', 'giving', 'caring'.

Good grief.

Probably thinks masking is all nonsense, too.

I wonder if there's a perception of dislike that's greater than what's truly there.

I started a thread the other day asking if someone could tell me why inset days are counted as part of term-time rather than as out-of-term. Not really anything to do with teachers as such, except that the days happen to be for teacher development stuff — they're not the ones who decide these things. I got some helpful answers explaining why, administratively and organisationally, it makes sense to classify them that way, but oddly I got several responses that were very defensive, as though I'd criticised teachers, or wanted them to give up more holiday time.

I think that teachers probably do get a lot of flak for things that they can't do anything about, and people will inevitably generalise and misunderstand. But I wonder if the level of pressure felt from all sides means that there's also some kneejerk defensiveness that leads people to perceive criticism of teachers where actually someone's, say, asking a general question about the school system, or criticising one teacher in particular, or taking issue with the way the system works (and possibly misunderstanding teachers' role in that).

In my experience, people are jealous of the holidays they perceive teachers to have. They think they work 9-4 and have minimum 3 months holiday.

Inset days, once called Baker days were taken from the teachers’ holidays and happen adjacent to school term days for administrative convenience. The pupils still get the same number of days of learning. If teachers sound defensive I imagine it’s because they get sick to the back teeth of explaining the adding of five working days to their annual workload.

This.

My dsis was a deputy head for years and was never off duty. and then trying to home school during covid showed me what I didn't know about patience 😀

Most teachers are brilliant.

Probably memories of the sadistic fuckers that seems to be let loose in times past. My kids schools seem more akin to prisons than schools, I would have hated going to their schools.

Tbh I no longer trust any "authority figures"

Teachers are so negative about everything and the negativity then seeps into their personal lives. I'm friends with a lot of teachers and it's the same thing every time. They start out really positive and enthusiastic and get sucked into a negative way of thinking at work. I don't know any other profession to complain as much about their jobs to their friends and family as teachers do. And then they start to complain about everything else in their lives/the world as well.

Negativity breeds negativity.

This type of question is also asked more than any other profession, which is part of the issue. I think teachers perceive that the profession is disliked, more than it is actually disliked, but the "everyone hates us" mentality from some teachers is part of the problem (as has already happened on this thread - talking about only being paid 39 weeks of the year but not then acknowledging that the FTE salary is pretty high drives me nuts most personally, but I think that's mainly me).

In my and my children's educational career, there have been some fantastic teachers, some poor teachers and most stick around the middle: perfectly good job, the odd issue but nothing really the complain about. Frustratingly, having an ND child (cannot believe a teacher of 17 years doesn't know the term, although the number of teachers who think that 'if you assessed any child theud find something' is scary), one bad one sucks so much time out of you and causes so much frustration that the large body of 'doing a perfectly decent job' teachers can fade into the background.

Also, compassion fatigue is a thing and teachers can suffer from it just like medical professionals - you can't actually always go above and beyond.

Child of teachers. Most of my friends teach. I am not a teacher but work in schools. I also work 50hrs a week (paid for 37) and buy resources for the kids I work with so it's similar, although I get paid 52 weeks a yr not 39.

Mostly I have huge respect for teachers. They work hard, do long hours, care hugely about their kids.

I do also come across teachers like @Diamond7272 with an attitude to children with additional needs which means they should probably not be in the classroom, sencos who don't believe children can mask, teachers who cannot conceive that parents might know their children better than school staff do etc. Some refuse to give up resources eg cupboards or to move rooms where would allow a child's needs to be met with dignity. "But this is my [classroom, cupboard, xyz] and it's been mine for 20 years. You can't expect me to change" which I find peculiar.
Sometimes it feels as though there are some teachers who have gone from school to university and back to school and have very little concept of compromise, negotiation or the world outside if teaching.

I think teachers get a raw deal in the right wing press too and they are made to jump through ridiculous hoops by the government to deliver things which are not evidence based or meaningful, synthetic phonics, naming of parts in spag ( which is more important than writing clearly and well etc.

Teachers are not at all denigrated on MN- start a thread on shit nurses tans why they are all uncaring, unfeeling shits and you'll soon fill up.......