Is teaching really so stressful?

[summertime06]

Really trying to get my head around this without getting flamed. I have a good friend who is a teacher, part time since having kids, doing the same hours as me (I'm not a teacher), 3 days a week.

For the past year or two, all I ever heard when we met up was how stressful her job was, how difficult it was to be a teacher and a mum at the same time etc etc. I get that there's work to be done outside teaching hours, but I do the same in my completely different job and just get on with it, I think it's part of the job when you get up the pay scale/responsibility level a bit. Any time I did mention that things were similar in my job, I was put down, I couldn't possibly understand how stressful it was to be a teacher?!

And now she's made the decision to take a career break for a few years because there's just no way she can continue to be a teacher and a mum to 3 young kids. That's fine if that's what she wants to do but she's making out that she's been left with no choice but to make this decision because teaching is just so difficult. Is it just me or am I missing something? I get that it can be stressful as are lots of other jobs, but there are surely also lots of advantages? Not having to sort out summer camps and childcare during school holidays? Is it really so much more difficult and stressful compared to other jobs? I genuinely want to understand!

That type of energy

When I was teaching I realised that I could not teach in the classroom and give my own children the attention that I felt they deserved, largely because I felt sucked dry - mentally, physically, emotionally - by the time I arrived home.
Thankfully, I have additional qualifications which meant I could change my role.

As almost everyone has been to school and/or has children, they perceive that they know how easy the job is. What they forget is that some of the 30 people in the room that teachers are expected to teach are just not in a position to be able to learn, or are actively trying to stop the teacher from teaching. This is perceived as being the teacher's fault, and they are penalised financially for it. Observations have to be recorded, assessments moderated, teaching observed and scrutinised by SLT, advisors and inspectors.

Where pupils have any kind of additional needs, schools are the gateway to getting additional support. Except that support isn't there due to the overwhelming demand, so the teacher has to provide what they can. Despite being a professional with relevant qualifications, a recommendation as to what a child needs, can only be considered if it is supported by external evidence.

The Safeguarding responsibility is huge. A child is absent yet again. Have they just got another bug, or are they being kept home until their bruises have faded or so they don't mention xyz that happened at the weekend?
Parents refuse to engage with school's requests or become aggressive. Are they hiding something that means the child isn’t safe?
No PE kit again. Is it just forgotten? Chaotic household? No washing facilities so PE kit or underwear isn't clean? Scars from unexplained injuries that might be seen when getting changed? etc.etc. etc.

Every interaction with every child or parent has the potential to be misinterpreted, and result in a potentially career-ending allegation. Read some posts on here about things some people want to complain about and how upset they get about it. Schools are the only agency that most families have to interact with every day. When life gets stressful, it is often the school that picks up of the difficulties or that people turn to, either for support or to sound-off at.

Listen to the news over a period of a few days. Every time an issue comes up that politicians can not solve, the expectation is that the teaching profession will. With no extra resources or training.
Teenage pregnancy, drugs, knife crime, forced marriage, child poverty, healthy eating, safeguarding, mental health, road safety...

When comparing the pay to that of other jobs, remember that many teachers are providing resources out of their salary in order just to do their job. Things like supplying extra pens and glue sticks, by printing resources at home using their own ink, paper and electricity, by bringing in interesting resources, or by spending money at the school fair.

If there was ever an all-out total continuous teachers' strike, it wouldn’t be long before other services were affected to breaking point, either by having staff unable to work as they need to care for their children or by having to deal with the additional fallout created by there being large numbers of under-supervised children and teenagers.

I've been a school governor - the amount of paperwork to show how they are doing their job and how the Children are progressing- as well as the actual teaching itself- it's an amazingly tough job.

Yes it is. Especially in the UK.

It is the most stressful job in the world

Maddy68 how in earth would you know? But hats off to you for being the only teacher I've encountered in print (SM/press/TES or RL in 40 + years of teaching. who has made such a ridiculous statement.

My mother was a teacher and a couple of my close friends are teachers. I think it's an incredibly stressful job. I get that other jobs are also stressful but in different ways.

I'm a social worker and that's also stressful as I am working with people who are often in crisis. But I still think it's a different sort of stress to teaching.

• 30% of teachers leave within 5 years.
• Average primary teacher in England works 60 hours a week, 55 for a secondary teacher
• suicide rates of primary teachers are nearly double the national average

A quick google give you lots of statistics and personal stories.

OP, you sounds like a brilliant friend 🙄🙄

"It is the most stressful job in the world."

I think this is the type of statement that winds folk up. I don’t disagree that teaching is stressful. More stressful than being in the military on deployment? More stressful than being a paediatric surgeon operating on tiny babies? More stressful than being a children’s residential worker, prison officer? I’m not so sure.

And this is what so many of the threads try to point out, only to be accused of denying that teaching is stressful.

Yes it is a stressful job. Many jobs are stressful - but their practitioners rarely try to turn it into a competition.

To point this out triggers a response that accuses you of saying teaching isn't stressful, even when you have directly agreed that it is...

I'll never teach full timer again. I can just about cope on 3 days. I have taught for 17 years and the behaviour is getting worse, the administration is getting much heavier, the curriculum is shit (Scotland) and schools seem to be run by people who can't teach themselves but will happily bully anyone who they think can't do everything perfectly.
I had a period off ill with stress and it really made me realise that the right school is vital.

Op 80% of teachers are leaving in the first five years. I was one of them.

The part of the job that involves being with the children is amazing but people massively underestimate the amount of work that gets done at school before and after the children arrive, at lunch breaks and as well as outside school. The hours are long too.

Teaching is very heavily scrutinised. Op in your job do you constantly have to prove yourself through observations and unnecessary paperwork in which you have to explain what you're doing and why? It's mentally and physically tough to be under so much pressure.

Forgot to add in primary you're a massive part of each child's life and a huge influence on them. That's a great feeling but also a huge responsibility!

Op I get that your job is just as stressful but is it constantly heralded as a magic, easy job by friends, family, the media?

Maybe that's why teachers always feel like they need to justify themselves.

@BelleSausage

There is a difference between being ‘on’ for cooperative patients who want to be there and have booked to see you as a professional and having spent two hours carefully planning a lesson where at least 50% of the audience cannot be fuck, 25% actively hate each other and about 5% haven’t slept or eaten.

Oh definitely this! Except if only 25% of the class hate each other then you are doing well. Trying to get my year 10 to stop screaming at each other so that I can even begin to explain some maths is impossible.

I think the hardest thing about teaching is knowing that all the time and effort you put in to planning a lesson when you could have been spending time with your own children is often completely wasted.

A good one hour lesson can take 2 hours to plan,assess and resource. I teach 14 lessons a week (over 3 days). I get 2 hours planning/marking time in school, this is above union minimum guidelines so I’m meant to feel lucky! The other 26 hours needed are meant to come from my own time after 4pm at night or on a weekend. Full time teachers in my school teach 22 hours a week- that’s 44 hours to prepare to a standard that’s seen as acceptable.

In reality I don’t spend 2 hours planning each lesson. I plan a few good ones a week and the others are a quick board explanation and then a worksheet- I don’t have the time or energy to plan anything beyond this. According to teaching professionals I am letting my children down by doing this.

Oh and can’t we use lesson plans from last year- thanks to constant curriculum changes no the majority of the time we can’t.

Why has it been playing on your mind so much? You both don't think the others' job is stressful, does it really matter? Teaching is exhausting, and pay increments tend to stop after 6 years which also isn't that appealing; but this is also true of other jobs.

Another teacher thread.
Some wide eyed innocent claim that someone couldn't possibly understand why their friend might be talking about feeling overwhelmed and seeking a career break in a profession that's on the news regularly for having a crisis retaining staff.

People reply pointing out the difficult elements of the job.

Someone will inevitably turn up to say 'see! See! Look at teachers. All they do is act like their job is the worst in the world.'

Coincidence?

For what its worth OP, some of us love our jobs. I certainly do. But a quick browse of the education board would probably give you more genuine insight into education today than a thread in AIBU.

YABU.

DM was a teacher. She eventually has a career change and we got our lovely mum back.

I left teaching (PT) because it was too stressful given the age of my child and the school environment I was in.

There are a couple of possibilities at play.

1. I am a snowflakey, morning, lazy fuck.
2. Teaching is stressful
3. My life was otherwise very stressful in some particular way

3 isn’t the case.

🤷🏻‍♀️

*moaning

Any job involving being responsible for affecting the present and future of multiple children and dealing with multiple parents on a daily basis, year in year out, is self-evidently going to be stressful. What do most parents stress about more than anything else in the world? Their children and their children's future. And many are only too happy to blame schools for failing them. That's one hell of a lot of angst to be dumping on people who thought they were just going to be responsible for passing on their knowledge of differential equations or whatever. And seeing on a daily basis what can happen when parents don't have the time and energy to deal with their own children's problems effectively probably does make you more acutely aware of how your own exhaustion at the end of the day is likely to be affecting your own children, so compounding the guilt of being there to help other children whose parents don't have enough time or emotional energy for them, but not being there for your own children.
Of course teaching is not the most stressful job in the world, but yes of course it is stressful. If someone thinks they can't cope with the guilt of being there for multiple other people's children on a daily basis and are feeling that they are then too drained to go through it all again with their own children, then they should give up teaching and find another job that doesn't rub their own anxieties in their face quite so much. Or have a break for a while before they reassess their future.

My favourite thing is sitting on the loo with a sigh at four pm ish (later if staff meeting day) and suddenly realising that is the first time I have gone to the Loo since leaving my house at 6.30am!

This whole thing is based on torturous logic, though, isn’t it?

Person A leaves her job because of stress.

Person B who isn’t leaving her own job because of stress (and says she enjoys it) moans that Person A cannot have been that stressed.

Person A turns out to be part of a huge wider group leaving their jobs because of stress.

Person B still thinks her own job is just as stressful and Person A must just be a whiney wimp.

I don’t know. Maybe the teachers are making it up for fun. Anything’s possible.

Genuinely, I have NO idea how anyone with a young family is a teacher.

Mine are older now so it's, doable, but I have a friend (secondary teacher) who has twin DDs and a DS, all under 6 and I don't know how she does it. She does look permanently knackered.

And to touch on one of the OPs points, I would also hate for either of my DCs to become teachers.

Not a teacher, but have loafs of family and friends that are.
Some cope well, some not at all. what i get from between them.

• its a normal job, NOT a family friendly job by any means . the ones who went int teaching because they expected it to be family friendly struggle a lot.
• work comes in bursts, crazy and very inflexible at times, super flexible at others (like when in the school holidays you do your prep). the contrasts are massive and mentally not easy to deal with
• its an “in the public eye” job. you are judged 24/7, developing a thick skin is necessary, but needs to be balanced with being reasonable
• people expecting you to have an easy life is highly annoying. so are people expecting you to be a martyr
• its underpaid
• differences between schools are massive.
• the problem aren’t the children. its the parents (