Okay, about teachers...

[KitKat1985]

Okay I'm being brave here. I know a few people who happen to be teachers. Whenever they talk about their jobs, there's a real 'no other profession has to work as hard as us' vibe to their speech. I am fully aware and in agreement that it's a stressful job with long hours and ridiculous amount of pressure if you don't count the long holidays but it's hardly the only profession that has these issues. I myself am a nurse, and 14 hour shifts on an under-staffed ward with no breaks and several severely ill / abusive patient to look after are hardly a picnic either. But whenever I discuss work with teacher friends there's a definite 'if you want to talk about stress you should try being a teacher' element to the conversation, and it's starting to really get on my nerves. Lots of jobs are stressful, teaching isn't the only one! And it's only teachers I know that seem to have this general attitude about their profession. AIBU? Is it really more stressful than any other profession out there?

I know most teachers don't, but I have heard a few say things like that other professionals get to take their holidays when they want to. And things like that just shows a lack of understanding of some other jobs. I believe teachers when they talk about their work, but if you have not done other jobs, you don't know what they are like.

And other jobs are very under appreciated, child protection social workers being a very obvious one. Counsellors are also "on" all the time and can spend up to 6 hours a day counselling and if working in the NHS often have a lot of paperwork to do at home.

I personally think the worst job around is child protection social worker, it is incredibly stressful, very responsible, you get frequent verbal abuse, they are very overworked, you see and hear very harrowing things, and few people value what you do.

TBG sunshine what used to get my goat when my dc were at primary was the level of complaining about how hard the staff worked and the strain they were under when the school was a top of the tables cofe in a very very leafy borough. The children were almost without exception middle class and well looked after - in fact I can't think of a single family where the parents weren't university educated. And on to the next round of fundraising: sponsoring piano keys for a £1000 a piece, raising money for a wildlife garden, etc., etc. The PTA fair got up to £15k before we left - and yet still they moaned!

I've spent quite a bit of time with social workers recently including ones working in child protection. No way would I want to do their job.

Teaching is almost a perfect storm - it is stressful, it's long hours and low pay and people don't appreciate it or respect it.

I can't really think of another profession that suffers from all of that."

Social Work

^^

THANK YOU!

I'd say A and E nurses would be up there too, TBH

And these people only get 5 weeks per year off, BTW.

I know someone will pop along and tell its pro rata or whatever the fuck but however you want to cut the friggin cake : teachers are not required to be in the school for a quarter of a year. There is no other profession like that.

teachers are not required to be in the school for a quarter of a year. There is no other profession like that.

It therefore begs the question why that alone is not enough of a pull to stop so many quitting altogether after such a short time and why not enough start to train, to fill vacancies... You would think it would, wouldn’t you!?

And other jobs are very under appreciated, child protection social workers being a very obvious one. Counsellors are also "on" all the time and can spend up to 6 hours a day counselling and if working in the NHS often have a lot of paperwork to do at home.

I personally think the worst job around is child protection social worker, it is incredibly stressful, very responsible, you get frequent verbal abuse, they are very overworked, you see and hear very harrowing things, and few people value what you do.

This also exactly describes teaching though. Child protection social workers are an amazing lot on the whole. Especially as you don’t need a specific degree to do it anymore and funding is so tight. I’d ask you to consider just how many directly bashing threads are started on them, here, however, on a daily basis that don’t have posters from all backgrounds backing them up. How many derisory news stories are written about them, daily, in comparison. How many social media posts are started that complain about them?

And why is not being able to take holidays when it is cheaper or more convenient, not a valid point? Genuine question.

Teachers do not have the most stressful job and most don’t say this. There are idiots and whiners in every type of job. No disputing that.
They do say they have a stressful job when prompted or goaded. That includes ones like me, who did also used to have another job in a different industry.

I think one of the things which makes teaching feel particularly stressful (although it's probably true of lots of nursing jobs too) is the sense that you never get to the end of your to do list, and there's always more work that you could be doing. Plus there aren't the resources to do it all as well as you know you could, and there are so many pulls in different directions. When I taught mainstream ( which I did for nearly 20 years) I never finished at the end of the day thinking right, that's that done, but instead always felt like I could keep on going with lots more things to do.

Teachers are often their own worst enemies, though.

When I started in education, I would feel the need to do it all. Now I refuse and concentrate on what is actually necessary to educate students, sort out behaviour and safeguarding. The rest gets ignored or done by students during form and detention time. Makes a big difference to how stressed I feel.

I'm still getting out, but that has more to do with not wanting to be the punching bag for students and parents anymore; I'm too old for that now and deserve to be treated with more respect.

Someone made a good point the other day when they said teachers often treat each other like children and behave like them, because that's what they surround themselves with day after day. Hence, possibly, the moaning.

We are scraping the barrel for staff at the moment. If the general public truly understood how poor recruitment and retention is and its effect on the quality of our children’s learning they’d be shocked, truly.

Definitely worth repeating. Especially when TA and classroom support roles are also being cut, the lack of consistency is getting worse each year.

I imagine the reason there are so many threads about teachers is because education is the one area that affects most parents on a daily basis. Unless you have a child with serious medical issues, no other profession has that much regular involvement. Therefore we will have an opinion on that as parents, and rightly so.

To those on here saying why not retrain if its that easy...what a silly, simplistic suggestion. Do you really think most people can afford to just stop working and go back into education?

That’s akin to me saying, if the school you work at is so badly managed that you work 60 hour weeks and through the holidays, stop moaning about it and change to a better school. Because there are plenty of teachers who don’t work like that so perhaps the issue is the school you’re currently at (or the way in which you organise your work).

This thread literally serves to back up some of the stereotypes of moaning teachers unfortunately.

Moaning or defending against comments that have been made?

To those on here saying why not retrain if its that easy...what a silly, simplistic suggestion. Do you really think most people can afford to just stop working and go back into education?

In shortage subjects, you get more money training than a senior-level teacher. It is actually worth considering... Of course, your take-home pay halves after that, but training could give people a valuable insight

Teachers don't get paid for the long holidays. Their pay is spread over the year. I teach and although I love teaching I have advised my daughter not to go into the profession. Your life is not your own. I'm sure many other professions are the same in terms of stress and workload but teachers do tend to get lots of abuse - from students, parents and managers. I think that I should why we use every opportunity to remind non-teachers that our jobs are stressful.

I’m a secondary teacher and I wouldn’t say it’s more stressful than nursing as I don’t have the responsibility of people’s lives in my hands. But I would argue that it creeps into your home life more though - I work three days a week and DH pointed out this morning (saying maybe I should find another job) that I easily do a 40 hour week with the evenings and time I put in at weekends to stay on top of everything. I think it can take over your home life in a way that I’m not sure nursing does. But I certainly wouldn’t argue that it’s more stressful! Hats off to the nurses on this thread, I couldn’t do your job.

I can see how stressful teaching is but at the end of the day it's not life and death situations like people in the medical sector have to deal with.
I also don't agree that nurses don't take their work home with them. Ok it's not usually in the physical sense but try switching off and having a good night sleep after a shift where one of your patients has died and you've sat with their shocked and grieving family trying to process the news. It's incomparable in my opinion and those moments never leave you.

I'm a teacher. I don't claim that my job is more stressful than others. I fully appreciate that others are equally and more so. But I don't think there is another job which comes under so much scrutiny from EVERYONE. Everyone has an opinion on how you do your job and feels that they know how to do your job better than you, 30 x 5 students a day plus all their parents, step parents and grandparents who all want blood, everyone you come across on a daily basis outside of school, where you are observed doing your job all the time and justifying to yout seniors every day why you are doing what you are doing.

Butterfly. I’d call it moaning yes.

Don’t get me wrong, I think many teachers do a great job and work hard but they don’t have the monopoly on that.

When posters say things like “I’m sure other professions are the same in terms of stress and workload but teachers get lots of abuse” do you not see how that comes across as moaning because there are many other professions that receive daily abuse on a scale that most teachers couldn’t comprehend 🤦‍♀️

I think for teachers it is the bashing they get from people like you that gets their back up. They’re always accused of saying they’re more stressed than any other profession but I’ve never heard any teacher friends say anything of the sort. It’s as though teachers should always put up and shut up because they get ‘long holidays’.

Successive governments have done an excellent job in destroying any empathy and respect that the public might have felt for the teaching profession. This has been a good tactic, as we would never have public backing now for the strikes that are needed. I was in a union meeting last week in which people were sat with their head in their hands, crying over workload.
The attitude from government, society, and school management has been "like it or lump it” for many years. The problem is that now so many of us are "lumping" it.
As an extreme example, one of our classes last year had 8 teachers. This was a combination of teachers off sick with stress, and NQTs leaving the profession.
It's the children that suffer, of course. But nobody thinks about this, and so the old tropes about teacher holidays and teacher moaning are rolled out. The race to the bottom continues.

@Dorsetdays
That's not moaning that's pointing out a fact. The comment didn't say more abuse than anyone else or no other profession gets abuse like teachers.

People say - teachers have it easy, get long holidays, work short days etc. Other jobs work longer, less holidays, get abuse

Teachers say - actually we do this.... or we get this... So correcting the misconception and then people say " see you're moaning" or " you're saying you've got it harder than anyone else"

The minute a teacher posts factual information about their job or addresses a misconception they are moaning.

People can post anything they want ( usually being negative) but if teachers respond they are moaning - they can't win.

In regards to abuse - do you have a full understanding of the abuse some teachers receive from some parent and students? That's a question not a moan or stating it's worse than any other profession

When posters say things like “I’m sure other professions are the same in terms of stress and workload but teachers get lots of abuse” do you not see how that comes across as moaning because there are many other professions that receive daily abuse on a scale that most teachers couldn’t comprehend
Yes, we definitely can't comprehend.

The point is that every tom, dick and Harry thinks they're a bloody expert in education.
I dont talk shop out of work but will correct people who deliberately chat nonsense (presumably because they've got so little in their own life or such massive chips on their shoulder that they have nothing better to do).

Equally, how many times is this thread done to death on here? How many times do we get threads about other hard working professionals with the sole intention of starting a bunfight (with the usual cagey "oh I'm not saying they don't work hard but let me just have a bitch...")?
How many threads on MN are trolls making up stories about fake events in hospitals or about other professionals? Just the other day there was our old friend back again making up stories about what teachers have apparently said in the staff room. Another totally false thread designed to get people bitching about teachers.

Lots of professionals have stress. Lots face abuse. Lots have different highs and lows. I've never seen a teacher who claims their work is more difficult than anyone else's, but I've seen a LOT of teachers get fed up having to justify their jobs and their workplace concerns to frankly whiny, goady types who have nothing better to do than whinge because "eeeeh you get holidays".

@Dorsetdays

You asked why I commented if I found the thread boring. I find the thread boring because once again, it’s constant bashing of people who, for the most part, are just trying to do their best.

I don’t complain to non teachers about my job and I certainly am aware that other people also have busy and stressful jobs.

I do my job because I love it, and really try my absolute best every day for other people’s children. The 13 weeks of holidays are an incredible perk - I don’t even mind that I work some of them, holiday work is done at a leisurely pace with a coffee in my hand.

You say that parents should have an opinion, well yes, I agree. However, this term, I have witnessed a colleague being bullied mercilessly by parents mainly because they’ve decided she’s not up to scratch. We’ve been back a few weeks and they really have no idea how competent she is or isn’t. They decided by looking at her across the playground that she would be no good. She is trying so hard, and the parents are spreading rumours, telling their children she’s no good (which has lowered their respect for her, making her job harder) and harassing her every day. I expect she will end up signed off soon.

These kinds of threads fuel pointless anger at a profession who really are just trying to educate children. We’re, for the most part, not some sort of lazy sub-race who just take weeks upon weeks of holidays, think no one else works hard, and enjoy moaning relentlessly....

Stop having a go at us and we’ll stop defending ourselves.

Stop having a go at us and we’ll stop defending ourselves

Amen!

If only the thread could end there!

Tbf I get a bit fed up of hearing how shit nursing is and seeing memes about how hard they work. I often wonder if it's so bad why nurses don't just leave and find an easier job to do?

But I don't start threads about it.

YABU - My husband and I are teachers. Usually in school for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week with 3 hours evening work each night. Plus a few hours on the weekend. Yes we have the holidays but even those are taken up with paperwork and planning.

We average 53 hours a week over 48 weeks a year. Which is more than a lot of professions and we get paid a lot less. RE Nurses, their work is hard but they work three days a week and don't take any work home with them to do. It's easier to switch off.

I'm not saying teaching is the hardest job in the world but it is hard. Very hard. Everything about it is hard. The supposed 'holidays' do not makeup for that in the slightest.