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...

We’ll that’s a surprise because many are fucking incapable of teaching.

Ok. That's quite a bold claim. Every teacher has to be observed and go through an annual PM process, and outcomes assessed against standards, so I would suggest that "incapability" would surely be picked up in the early stages. Wherever I have worked, that's been the case.

Its less than minimum wage to exam mark

Still boosted my salary. Which was a response to a statement.

I wasn’t sure whether you meant that teachers were leaving the profession or parents disliked teachers. Probably both 🤔

I deal with teachers every day and what I notice about them compared with other groups of professionals is that they are very arrogant, to make a very broad generalisation. The God complex thing. They are used to telling children and young people what to do and it seems they continue being bossy to other adults which is not endearing.
I also notice that I do not get this attitude from principals, in general they are extremely efficient and professional.

Parents have totally unfeasible expectations as to what a teacher can do for their one child, out of 200 children that teacher teaches.

Teachers are expected to prepare and deliver fresh, engaging, purposeful, 21st century relevant lessons as though that's our whole job. We're also expected to mark all that work, give meaningful feedback, check back on corrections, and chase late work.

And then form tutors are expected to provide pastoral support, which often ends up being significant social support, as though we don't have lessons to teach or work to mark! And EVERYTHING needs to be logged, and forwarded, and discussed, and followed up.

And that's before you add in academic enrichment and co-curricular expectations outside of timetabled lessons.

Ive never met a teacher who had enough hours in the day to do all that. And when we drop any one of those balls, the keyboard warriors are baying for our blood.

The problem is that classroom teaching is the tiniest part of our job. I absolutely love teaching, I'm experienced, I can do a very job of it. Except, I never get the chance these days. Classes are too big, kids are too disruptive, parents are too demanding, and teachers have way too many responsibilities on top of just teaching the bloody lessons.

i find this very surprising - teachers only teaching the easy stuff to maths classes - yes that’s what she said - we like to make the class nice - really? Not very nice when dcs fail an exam because they haven’t been taught the content! Something’s not right!

Indeed! I would say something is very wrong indeed! Why wasn't this picked up by her manager or during outcome checks? Not teaching the content correctly has lead to 2 teacher dismissals where I work (although one resigned before they were pushed).
A matter for the Governors - present evidence. They're gone.

And yet you took time out of your day to comment 🤷🏻‍♀️

@WeAreRuined - I don't want to derail the thread with your particular concern, so I'm sending you a DM with further advice.

I'm not bothered. Like I said, I'm interested. I agree that many professions get criticised on MN but as I'm not involved in any of them it would be odd for me to ask the same question about them.

In my experience random negativity towards teachers sometimes seems to come from older people who didn’t have a pleasant time at school. I want to be sympathetic but it is a bit daft at the end of the day.

The number of threads that start by asking this question with faux naivety and then claim that they are not being goady astounds me. It’s an MN trope to bang on about teachers. I’ve been teaching 28 years and have never found this in real life. Also how can you dislike an entire profession? Tedious and unintelligent.

Absolute nonsense.

So is it only paid 39 weeks of the year, or do you get 13 week's holiday? You can pick but you can't say the FTE salary is the same as the actual salary unless you also acknowledge you get 13 week's holiday. If you only get paid for the weeks you work, it's more like a 30k FTE starting salary. Plenty of graduate jobs don't pay near that! Law for example (outside of the big London firms).

I think (most) teachers work hard in a job that can be really pressured. I certainly don't think they work 9-3 and laze around outside of that. I have enormous respect for (most) teachers and accept you get bad apples in any profession but please stop complaining about the salary!

@FrancescaContini

That wasn't my intention, but I can see how it has come across. Apologies

@Maireas I do refer back to all of those things but I was interested from a different perspective.

Realised you were talking about 35k after 6 years. Again, that's around a 42k FTE (I'm doing rough maths and assuming 4 weeks holiday). It's not rock star money but you'll find a lot of graduates not earning that 6 years in (lawyers included to carry on my previous example).

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. It's been a really interesting discussion.

My dc have had some wonderful teachers. One inspired my dc1 to study the subject she taught him in secondary school at A level. My uncle is a retired teacher.

But to answer your question, I encounter a lot of teachers in my workplace. I meet a lot of people from a lot of different industries there. At my workplace, we all find the teachers the rudest and most entitled. Many speak to us like we’re pupils. I work long, unsociable hours and the job is not well paid but teachers often seem to want to tell us how hard they work. Not long ago, a teacher said the most unkind, rude and personal thing I’ve ever had said to me at work.

But I will always believe that 1 good teacher in school can be all you need to inspire and set you on a path to success.

DH would say that I have a tendency to use my teacher voice at home 😳.

I don't realise I'm doing it half the time.

For me the thing that I dislike about some teachers is the total lack of insight into how other people's working life compares to theirs.

For example, there was a thread on here about childcare recently where a teacher was trying to claim that teaching is the hardest profession "near impossible" to get childcare to fit round. I'm a paramedic, paid childcare to fit around 12 hours day, night and weekend shifts which rarely finish on time, on a rotating shift pattern simply does not exists, and that's without even trying to cover Christmas Day!

It's ridiculous comments like that, that don't do your profession any favours and should be swiftly rebuked by less hard if thinking members of your profession in order to keep some credibility.

At the church I used to go to the teachers were mostly easy to identify because they talked to everyone as if they were about 6.

However I think they must be a special sub-set of teachers because I have several friends who are teachers who don't seem to have that manner!

Good listening!😂