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

I earn less than £46K and am on the upper pay spine and TLR 1f, which adds over £10K to my salary.

Classroom teachers do not earn £46K.

Hey Jamie, come see the threads about SALTs on the Special Needs: Children subforum! Plenty of robust criticism about the (sometimes woeful!) service provided my my colleagues. Most of which I whole-heartedly agree with, sadly... and to be honest, I understand what you are saying about teacher's feeling harangued by the media but at least it is an indicator of public presence.. we just get cut out of existence and no one even notices. Teachers used to have that social standing and it is a terrible shame for all of society that it no longer exists, with deeper ramifications for all of us than the decline of other professions, say engineering.

I am paid crap, but I wouldn't want to be a teacher. I love my little groups and lack of contact with parents

No Feenie, I don't. I was having a bit of a debate. I put a lot of s after things to make this clear. You seem very affronted by what I am saying.

(Should also point out that as a tecaher who has her own children, I actually pay twice for INSET days - I pay for more childcare than usual when I have an INSET day (as they are always on days when I work a shortened day under my part time contract, but I attend for the full INSET day) AND I pay for childcare when my children's school has INSET days...)

I live...

Jamie, HLTA's are amazing and paid WOEFULLY for some of the high quality work they do. I never cease to be amazed by some of the dedication shown by HLTA's given the absolutely pathetic wage that you are given! Do you know in Ireland, where my sister now lives and is a support assistant, she gets 26K in Euro for a much shorter working day? If my job packs in, I am off to find me one of those jobs! Though they are pretty unsafe too, sadly.

If you check back, most of your are very passive aggressive, working9while5. And I would say most posters are affronted by what you are saying.

I am a teacher who works about 70 hours a week, that is not week in and week out. During the summer term I will go back down to about 50 as many of my exam classes have left. During the first half term it is about 60 as I there are no huge assessments or reports. This half term I will be doing peak hours as I am writing reports, marking exams as well as doing all my standard teaching chores. It will remain like that until the exam classes leave after Easter. There will be a few weeks respite during study leave for mocks and work experience. That will not be standard amongst teachers, it will vary according to the subject that they teach. It will also depend on how much they do during the holidays, how long they have been teaching, if they are teaching a new specification etc. I will also have to do more hours as I have additional responsibility.

I don't think that I am worth my wage because of the hours I work, although that is part of it. If it was just down to hours I would earn more than a maths teacher, but would take a pay cut if a new exam or curriculum specification had not been introduced lately.

I have no intention of trying to claim the prize for being the hardest working person in the universe, that would make me a mug rather than a professional.

I do agree that the hours during term time are excessive not least because children need energetic teachers who are interesting people, not robots worked into the ground. However I suspect lots of people are overworked, I know my dp is and he does something very different from me in the private sector.

Feenie in my DPs school they learn & use restraint positions. if you dont get the kid in the correct position quickly enough, you come aways with bites and scratches (primary school).

does that keep you happy?

Listen Feenie, you are trying to have a personal argument with me. You have been doing this for quite a while. Saying that comments are passive aggressive is MN speak for "I will discredit anything you say". If you want to take any issue with any of the MANY points I have made since, say, you had your 3/4 posts about my username, go ahead. We can have a better barney than you just telling me I am passive aggressive/have a chip on my shoulder/am a total cowbag or whatever and it will be way MORE FUN!

My points have been pretty straightforward, actually.. teachers are highly skilled, should be renumerated well for the sake of society, have training and experience and a stressful, challenging job BUT the holidays are a great perk and - for the few pages where I accidentally believed that the average salary was 37K to 46K - it seemed pretty damn well paid. Teachers are great but they are NOT ALL working 80 hours a week and there may be some who are who are not as good teachers as those working 45-50 hours on an average week. It is not the hardest job in the world and most teachers don't say it is, but sometimes on threads like these there can be arguments made that amount to halo-polishing and really don't reflect well on the profession. Assaults are commonplace in public facing jobs and not really worthy of consideration in the thread. There are lots of other highly skilled professionals who work closely with teachers who have a pretty good understanding of the demands although all jobs are different.

I'm not really sure what's so terrible about that, apart from the point that due to a very short-lived misunderstanding, I thought the pay was really quite substantially higher than I had thought and I was a bit shocked.

Yes twinklytroll, that is an issue. Overwork is endemic in our society, across very many positions.

I have to say truthfully that since going back to work after mat leave I have "dialled down" the amout of out of hours work I do. Ds is 23 months and I just CAN'T do what I used to. But my work has suffered, it's undoubtable. My resources are more shoddy etc, and in the 10 months since I have been back, every month has seen me bring MORE work home as really, we all know the expectation. It has taken me nearly a whole half-term to write IEPs this time around because I have been changing the monitoring system, trying to align B-squared and PIVATs with our developmental norms for the school tracking system, and realistically I know how slack it looks.. I did LOADS of it at home because there clearly isn't time in the school day for it, and yet I did so much LESS than I would have done two years ago that it still ends up looking crap. And this is despite all those extra hours...

So I understand what you say, about how the workload varies, about how new subjects and specifications alter that and about how much rests on the out-of-hours work. But I see this with dh's job, as you do with yours, in engineering. It is really quite hard to have a family life sometimes, and I suppose more so now that jobs are under pressure.

So I suppose this is why I played Devil's Advocate a bit. I understand that teachers want people to understand that the work is serious, challenging and time consuming.. and I think it is right that people do know this. But it is hard to mention that and say things like holidays being "deserved" or needing money for assaults etc without people who also face these pressures being a bit .

Which is why I do think it's best to take the pragmatic attitude as you have done and say I work bloody hard but I know it's not more than many other people and although I don't take the holidays off as many people think, I do like SOMETHING about them.

That's my real point here, honestly.

The impression I get about teaching is that there is almost no end to what you feel you could do. Newly-qualifieds must be ripe for burn-out. I feel it even in what I do, but I've had a career before, and I try to keep work very much in it's place, and I don't hold "visible" responsibility for what I do

its place

I don't think the curriculum helps, it is pretty prescriptive so teachers who are creative are always trying to mould it into something less so, which ultimately creates more work. My HLTA colleague who essentially had to do a lot of the work before we had a specialist teaching colleague in situ used to do oodles of work at home and it was so WRONG that she felt pressure to do that on the money she was getting. But I think I would too.

I think that's true. My supervising teacher is one such teacher

she's excellent, BTW

Feenie in my DPs school they learn & use restraint positions. if you dont get the kid in the correct position quickly enough, you come aways with bites and scratches (primary school).

does that keep you happy?

What do you mean, BigTillyMinto? My point was that some teachers get assaulted - why would your DP getting hurt make me 'happy' - what a bizarre thing to say.

mholdall - fuck off and when you get there, fuck off some more. You are a moron of the highest order.
Anyone who thinks that teachers have an easy life need to come and live at my house for a week to see the reality of the situation.

I shall say it again - Morons!!

Ooh, stepped out into RL for a bit and WW3 has broken out.

Where did the figure of 46K come from?
falkirk I take it you missed the section of this where loads of us got deleted for saying similar things?

And working you used the present tense in both your references to the schools you work in, hence the not unreasonable conclusion drawn by feenie.

Clam, I think someone took a (fallacious) claim that average class teachers earned £37k and then multiplied it up to include holiday pay if we were paid for holidays (IYSWIM)..

That old trick of taking a random number and multiplying it by a slightly suspect factor to get a bigger number which looks more impressive / contraversial..

clam - just had to get it off my chest, probably will get deleted but it makes me mad when ill-informed, small minded, pathetic twats think it's ok to spout utter rubbish about teachers.

I hope their children don't show the same utter contempt for their teachers that their parents so obviously do. I wonder if any of them have the balls to say it to their faces at the next parents evening. I guess not. Perhaps they're all too busy working in "proper" jobs in the private sector to even turn up.

Feckin' morons. Shame on you.

I was talking with my DC yesterday (7 and 4) and my youngest said I was the bestest mummy in the world. Then my eldest said I was the mummyest mummy in the world. I asked him what that meant and he said it meant that I did lots of mummy things.

To which my 4 year old added: 'Yes. Like marking'.

So I have a 4 year old who thinks that that is what mummies do. Now try telling me that teachers finish work at 3.30 and get 13 weeks doing nothing.

:(

I'm a parent governor at ds's primary. I can tell you that his teachers work extremely hard and extremely long hours, and I doubt very much that his school is unique. It's not unusual to go to a governor's meeting starting at 7.30 and to see staff still at school - not people staying for the meeting, people who are still doing their jobs. ds's school finishes at 3, so that's some serious overtime.

The big difference between teaching (and other public sector jobs) and 'real world' jobs is that teachers are expected to put with all sort of attacks from students and parents about the nature of their job. Which they did not create btw. What other professionals have to spend so much energy defending their working hours and justifying what they do in them?

And then have to accept the blame for all of society's problems? I laughed out loud during the summer riots when a news programme managed to blame teachers then!

Most sane people (not you OP) accept that teachers work extremely hard during term time, and less hard during the "holidays" which is the pay off for not having any kind of work/life balance for 39 weeks of the year.

I know many teachers and people in many other jobs and no one works as hard as teachers. And it is not easy to get into.

I know many teachers and people in many other jobs and no one works as hard as teachers. And it is not easy to get into.

I disagree with the last part - it's hard to get and keep a job in teaching though.

Some teachers work very hard, some don't.