Teachers - you're 'avvin a laugh aintcha?

[mholdall]

Kids recently had a week off - half term. They were back this week then, guess what - teacher training day. Seriously, what I want to know is this: is there ANY other job in the country where you get:

• 13 paid weeks holiday a year
• Good pay
• Good pension (believe me, you do compared to people who do proper jobs in private sector - if you dont believe me, try it)
• And yet you still need these extra days to do some training. Training for what, exactly? Seriously, for what???? And how am I, as a parent, supposed to factor childcare in here.
• Oh, and you still do nothing but moan about pay, pensions etc
• Rant over

Ohhh I could write a whole MN Shakey play now.

But I won't because these essays on Loyalty within the Story of Rith won't mark themselves. I've enjoyed my flit back to English though (I used to teach it but now reach RE)

I have met new teachers who complain about the pressure of the job. When i have sympathised and talked as well as about pressures in my job they have come back with, well I guess the difference is that we work lots of extra hours! As if no-one else does.

I have met some great professional teachers. But tbh overall my personal experience is that teachers do moan about their job more than others.

I wasn't saying you don't understand, lesley. As far as I can see you haven't come on here to tell us that teachers have a 'cushy' job and don't need more than a couple of E grade A' levels to rub together. Others have and it is them we are trying to paint a realistic picture too.

I don't think anyone is saying we have the hardest job in the world, or that we work longer than everyone else - we are just pointing out that we don't swan out of school at 3pm having had a lovely day playing with children and that we enjoy scheduling 'unnecessary' training to inconvenience parents. All of that has been levelled at us in this thread - and not by you.

I'm married to a teacher , he rarely moans about his job

Totally agree with that lifeissweet. tbh I think as well as there is a difference between jobs where people are in offices/meetings and so however busy you are have more control at least in less junior jobs over what you do next. And where you work with people in a situation where you have to respond then to whatever happens such as teaching and other jobs. I do think the latter brings a different kind of stress.

Helen, I think you need to look at the option whereby personal attacks are edited out of a post where that post contains other comments. Replace it with {personal attack deleted} but leave rest of the post in place. Otherwise a thread makes no sense at all. Reposting it takes it out of correct order.

Obviously posts which simply say, for example, " is an ignorant twatbadger " can just be deleted.

Thank you, saggarmakersbottomknocker!

This is annoying me now. I feel like I'm going round in circles talking to myself.

We are not a homogenous, faceless mass. some teachers moan about their jobs. Most don't.

We are not moaning on this thread.

The basic crux of the argument has been this:

some posters: 'you teachers have an easy life. You get long holidays and have the nerve to arrange training to inconvenience parents'

teachers: We don't have an easy life - we have long holidays, but we actually work pretty hard, thank you very much'

Not moaning - stating facts. That's how I read it anyway.

A shame though, SoupDragon, if poster A happens to be an ignorant twatbadger.

True. However, that is true of many deleted personal attacks, one would imagine.

When I went to uni in the 80's I knew some people who went to do a PGCE who really wanted to be teachers, but also quite a few who did it because they didn't know what else to do. I understand that has totally changed as it is now hard to get onto a PGCE.

But I do wonder sometimes if those teachers who do moan a lot drifted into teaching rather than chose it. I think stress in a job is always harder to deal with if you don't really want to do that job.

Also for people like me in my 40's and those older, when they went to school may have saw teachers having the choice of having an easier time.

When I went to school and especially in primary,there were some teachers who worked long hours doing extra clubs for example. But there were others who were going in the gate at 8.40am and leaving within 10 minutes of the kids leaving - I lived next door to the primary so saw them. A lot of the lessons involved working through bought in reading and numeracy booklets and outside of reception and final year in primary there was very little all class teaching to prepare for and very little marking. Certainly in my primary school if teachers wanted to, they could have an easy life.

Ladies this thread reads as if the OP is just having a laugh whilst doing some pretty basic teacher baiting.... Don't rise to it!

Oh yes and whoever said they have retrained as an accountant so they stop working til midnight and not work weekends. You are having a laugh arent you?! Seriously if you work in professional services I'd like to know who you expect your employer to be as from where i sit i can see the hours are usually long and the holidays are sh!te. & the pay is low for the stress until the upper levels. Most women drop out well before making partner as the slog to get there requires more hours than they want to work, more brown nosing than they want to do or they realise they have better things to do. Just saying.

The pro-rata thing really stumps me as an argument.

Teacher's basic pay is already equivalent and often much higher than nurses, OTs, physios, SLTs etc so how can those 13 weeks be unpaid? I am an Allied Health Professional working in schools (am completing an MSc, have very specialist skills) and I chose to work term time only after maternity. This means I am working .8 of a FTE post e.g. the equivalent of a four day week, so I get .8 of my former salary.

Do teachers really think they are "worth" 20% more salary than other public sector workers with similar training and experience?! I have great respect for teachers and enjoy working with them as colleagues but I don't agree that the holidays are unpaid. They are a perk that is factored into the salary, but not unpaid. If they are unpaid, salaries should be reviewed!

@SoupDragon

Helen, I think you need to look at the option whereby personal attacks are edited out of a post where that post contains other comments. Replace it with {personal attack deleted} but leave rest of the post in place. Otherwise a thread makes no sense at all. Reposting it takes it out of correct order.

Obviously posts which simply say, for example, " is an ignorant twatbadger " can just be deleted.

Might be worth considering, Soupy, but we fear that a) we'd be spending all our time editing posts b) people might be more inclined to post PAs that way, dontchathink?

I've known teachers like that too, lesley33 - but not in the last 10 years or so. There is little room to hide for slackers who cannot hack the pace in primary school, and a good thing too - good riddance.

Workload, monitoring, etc are a problem in primary schools - but at least it sees off the workshy.

I work in school - though not a teacher - and can honestly say the thing that cheeses us parents off about the training days at our school is the fact that they are not always notified at the start of year/term whatever.

TELL us when they will be well in advance and I can plan long weekends away a bit cheaper than normal

feenie - Yes I meant I saw teachers like that when I was a child. I have worked in schools so I know its not like that now. But some people may take their views of teachers from their own experience as children - and I could see then why they would have those views.

Looks like the OP can be as rude and obnoxious as she wants to posters then. A shred of consistency would be great from MNHQ. I've normally been able to see why some posts have been deleted but this thread has been turned from an interesting one to a joke.

This is what my stepdaughter has to say: 'Being a teacher's daughter isnt easy. when my mum leaves school and returns home she will work non-stop. Hearing the stories that she and others teachers have told me, it's not easy, having so many different classes to teach and so many different pieces of work to mark. Plus having to gain the children's respect and know how all the different children work and how they learn. Also some other teachers take on more work, for example my mum is an ict teacher and also an attendance officer for the school, she has to analyze data, runs meetings with students and their parents, runs assembles about what the students need to do to get the grads they want. If a student doesnt get the grade they hoped for then it will be on the teachers consciene. That's why teachers don't have an easy life.'

I get the impression the The OP's post is an exasperated post triggered by TRAINING DAYS in term term. In that respect she's got a point - they can a bloody nuisance to parents - these random training days. I think they ought to be incorporated into the end of term period.

parents would be more supportive of teachers if these were arranged at times that place parents in less difficulty

Schools are not run for the benefit of the parents. INSET days can't always just be tacked onto the end of holidays because outside speakers need to be booked at a time that they are available and sometimes to address a particular requirement (e.g. coursework moderation).

And in any case, it is not teachers who decide when INSET days are. So why be less supportive of teachers because of something they have no control over?

That's awful, Bytheway - my school publishes the dates of INSETS at the beginning of the year. I think that's normal practice. Maybe you need to mention it to your Parent Governor and have it brought to the Head's attention?

But teachers don't have an easy life, that is not entirely the point.

My mother and father are teachers. I grew up with all of those downsides you mention dollydoops, but the holidays were great. My mother is now a very high-ranking teaching union official and she feels strongly that teachers should not "justify" their holidays but should rightly recognise them as an immense perk of the profession. She worries that younger teachers in particular are overly vocal about the "hard lives" they have and this is damaging for public relations and gaining support for the teacher's cause which is really about protecting educational standards.

I agree. Teachers should respond to the holidays issue as a whitewash and explain how it impacts upon children's education when there is insufficient training, changes to class size, more squeezed resources etc as a result of cuts. That is important. Saying you have a hard life/work additional hours/it has pressures unlike any other job is just untrue. All jobs have upsides and downsides.

LAs do try and have INSET at the start or end of a holiday, but that is not always possible. If it's an in-house trainer leading the course it is fine. But there are only a few people in each LA that can deliver some of the training (e.g. fire safety, Safeguarding, SEN, new initiatives) and they can only visit one school at a time, hence some varied dates of school INSET. We did flag up the possiblity of all the schools getting together fo our last INSET day, but the course had to be tailored to our specific school.