To be sick of the current public slating off teachers!

[Belle15]

Just feel teachers are criticised from all angles at the moment and we work damn hard for very little financial gain or thanks!! Would like to see any of the people moaning about us actuallu spend a day in our shoes.Needed a rant!

Yes, I was being sensitive to our neighbours

Who are our neighbours, and sensitive - why?

Not belittling you at all, I pointed it out as it didn't matter to the context that I was trying to convey.

BTW. you still haven't said when you left teaching.

Sirchen

that would be Scotland and Wales, both who have fine educational systems that are also widely copied.

Agree Caster.

I can think of one teacher in DC3s school who is a bad teacher - everyone knows who she is, everyone dreads their child getting her as they know that they are in for a year of little progress, high absenteeism, and little interest from the teacher. She's been a teacher for a long time, nothing can be done about getting rid of her it seems, and presumably she's on the same pay scale as all the other fabulous teachers in the school.

8/9years ago,plenty of colleagues left who applaud a lot of the changes and don't moan.To be honest I find most griping is on here but MN has a high teacher demographic I'm sure.

Have to say re term time,holiday length and length of day I am with teachers.

Yes, here in Scotland we have a very good education system. I'm not always sure that it's recognised, which is a shame - if you look at many international schools they take about the UK curriculum or the British curriculum which doesn't exist.

SirChen

Its often mentioned in the same way as the international league tables which also don't exist.

MrButtercat

Pensions have changed 4 times in the last 5 years, and will be changing again next year, gold plated pensions no longer exist for teachers.

Back to PRP, how can you set standards for PRP when those standards and curriculum are being changed every year?

Also like many I'm now in the position of viewing the profession from the eyes of a parent with children in a not great school.Your whole perspective changes when you see a profession moaning and reusing to improve when it would benefit your children.It's actually infuriating.

I have experienced a whole variety of teachers,some fantastic,some middling and dire.I find it shocking that measures to improve the middling and dire are met with such resistance by the profession.

I think the mistake the OP is making is thinking the criticism is aimed at her if she is not lazy, poorly qualified etc.

I never feel attacked as a teacher, unless I read the Daily Mail or Mumnset - and let's face it they are interchangeable. I feel respected by pupils, parents and my local community. Tbh most people think my job is harder than it is. In a nutshell I talk about a subject I loved enough to study for years - at a simpler level - and stop the buggers from hitting one another.

As teachers we just have to stop moaning, yes we get criticised but often the criticism is in response to our moaning and then the criticism happens and then we moan again. It has become a circle of negativity that teachers need to break.

When you are in the thick of teaching it is hard and therefore we naturally want to moan. During term time a short day for me is 12 hours. During peak time I am up and working at home for 5am, working at school from 7am - which I leave at 6pm. I will then be a Mum until about 8 or 9 pm before working another few hours. On those hours you start to lose perspective and you get about moany. I forget that I am working those hours because I do bugger all for 12 weeks a year and that is my choice, I suspect when you average my hours out I am not working excessively at all.

Butter, when you do an IT release, you are releasing a finished product that you have had time to quality control and you know what it should do. Being judged on that criteria is reasonable.

When you go through Ofsted, fuck knows what they want to see, and as for planning, you can't even guarantee who is going to be in your class that day let alone how they are going to respond. Inspectors all have their individual wishlists and judgements of success or failure are subjective and based on a 20 minute snapshot.
It's not comparable. Stress levels maybe, but fairness of judgement? No.

How do you know that the profession is refusing to implement changes?

I don't know of any teacher that thinks that the system is perfect, the only resistance that I see is when the government insist on implementing change after change without seeing how the children are affected.

There is already seem PRP, I think some Headteachers need to make sure that they are only giving the pay to those who deserve it. I know when I was moving up the upper pay scale there were teachers who did not make it because there were results that were poor or the were not making a whole school contribution. In other schools you seem to move up automatically.

There are crap teachers, we all know who they are and the system needs to be quicker at moving them on, before they are in a situation in which they feel like they cannot do anything else.

The sad thing is that , in a secondary school, the strongest teachers often get promoted quite quickly and therefore spend less time in the classroom. The weaker teachers therefore are the ones who spend the most time teaching - I am not saying the only talented teachers are those in management positions

Noble giraffe you can't guarantee who will be in but unless your school has a huge attendance problem it is a fair assumption that the class on your register will be the one that is present .

Arisbottle

Apparently we can guarantee that the worse behaved won't be there because we take them out.

Its true because posters on forums say it is.

raven I meant no 12-month salary as in no 12-month payments, paid weekly so no payments over the holidays

I wish someone had told me that rule when I was teaching bottom set year 9 in front of Ofsted and had to make progress every 60 seconds while controlling them with the arch of an eyebrow and a steely stare.

Yes, BoneyBack - and Heads can stop them sitting SATs to make the school look better

It gives people someone to moan about. As another poster on another thread said, now the summer holidays are here, mumsnetters are moaning about their children. In September they will be back to moaning about the teachers. They will be quick to forget the trials and tribulations of looking after their own children all day long. A bit like I forget how exhausting a whole day of looking after a baby is, when I go to work and he goes to the childminder. Such is life!

It doesn't matter how gifted or talented a Teacher is, they cannot possibly be all things to all people.

Somewhere along the line, someone is going to become disgruntled with a particular Teacher. Guess what? That's life. We have to cop it sweet.

Noble noooooo you don't have time to quality control far from it.

A date is plucked out of the air by bosses who can't even code and who don't listen to reason.Said date then gets changed ie brought forward,extras get shoved in which needs months of coding.Said project wil be expected to be done with less bums on seats,temp staff on 4 x as much as managers etc etc.

Dp is v good at his job and worked in all sorts of environments(for big and small companies,diff sectors)- it never changes. At the end of the day you produce the code on the day whatever,bosses don't want excuses and it has to run with no bugs or it can cost the company £££££££.Don't forget other companies are waiting for said code and it filters down.There are security implications,time,money- all at risk.

Just using IT as an example,I'm sure other sectors are similar.

Got to take the kids to the beach so not ignoring answers.

Boney - that is true.

I think, in the main, teachers do a great job, as do most other professionals. Unfortunately they are in a job where they are responsible not only for our children's education but their emotional and physical wellbeing as well, and we hand over our precious poppets to what is effectively a complete stranger and trust that they will look after and help them develop their full potential. There is a lot of emotion involved in that process as a parent, and a huge responsibility on the part of the teacher. When you get a bad teacher, or a bad school, it can have a massive impact on a child and its family for the rest of its life.

It's not a job that I could ever do, but as a parent I will (and do) support the teacher and school 100% when I know I'm getting that 100% support back - iykwim?

The amount of misinformation about teachers/teaching and education in general is amazing, what is even more amazing is that people believe it without any proof.

I always find it surprising the number of people that think teaching is an easy job, with amazing benefits, long holidays, good pay etc... yet don't choose it as a career? If it really is such a good deal, why don't more graduates choose it as their first choice career path

For the record, I love my job as a secondary teacher, when I am actually planning or in the classroom. what I hate, and particularly at the minute, is reading the news on a weekly basis to hear the latest whim of Gove, based on fuck all research, always with the underlying implication that teachers are shit and that is why he is having to swoop in and change things. Most teachers I know, want to improve, want to try new things, want to make things better in school year after year. What is frustrating is all this impending change and uncertainty is doing is making everyone run about like headless chickens trying to jump through the latest hoop, showing progression every five minutes to someone that is going to watch 20 minutes of me teaching (which for the record is about 0.2% of the teaching I do in a year).

MrsHerculePoirot, I think one of the reasons that people don't consider teaching is because you never have the chance to teach when you're growing up. You know if you're good at English, science or maths from an early age and that usually shapes what you go on to do after school.

Buttercat,can you draw directly from your own experience or is it all simply your dh said?
It's about as much use as the man at the bus stop says
I think 1st hand account carries more gravitas than husband said....