Teachers and the current status quo

[Lifeisabeach09]

Maybe a teacher bashing thread or not, I can't decide.

My experience of this current lockdown is that my DD's teachers are streaming live or pre-recorded sessions from their homes. Support staff and teacher rotation are dealing with the kids in school. Learning is the same-school or home, it's streaming on Ipads, so the children are being treated fairly.

Surely, not have to deal with 30 unruly kids, not having to discipline, and being able to pre-record lessons or even livestream from home has made life easier (lovelier??) for some teachers. Obviously, each school is different and teachers situations are different (own kids, etc).

Any teachers enjoying the new status quo or AIBU?

We were sent a survey today about how we are feeling teaching remotely. I am used to flexibility and rapidly changing work conditions because I had a different career before teaching that required long hours and unpredictable situations and I gave been deployed to teach subjects outside my own specialisation. Colleagues who have only ever been teachers are finding it harder to adapt —and are whinging a lot—
Benefits are that I can plan live lessons around exercise and actually see daylight. But the actual lessons are less enjoyable - much more fun being in s real classroom and interacting on a properly human level.

I miss interacting with colleagues (even the whingers).
Workload is about the same but different tasks.
Online parents’ evenings definitely preferable to the real thing as parents get cut off automatically after 5 minutes and I can hide a gkass of wine out of sight 😀

@EmmanuelleMakro

We were sent a survey today about how we are feeling teaching remotely. I am used to flexibility and rapidly changing work conditions because I had a different career before teaching that required long hours and unpredictable situations and I gave been deployed to teach subjects outside my own specialisation. Colleagues who have only ever been teachers are finding it harder to adapt —and are whinging a lot— Benefits are that I can plan live lessons around exercise and actually see daylight. But the actual lessons are less enjoyable - much more fun being in s real classroom and interacting on a properly human level. I miss interacting with colleagues (even the whingers). Workload is about the same but different tasks. Online parents’ evenings definitely preferable to the real thing as parents get cut off automatically after 5 minutes and I can hide a gkass of wine out of sight 😀

You are doing so well until you dismiss your colleagues' views as "whinging". The implication of this is that their views are in some way not relevant

Whinge: complain persistently and in a peevish or irritating way.

You should be ashamed to put this view forward. You should be supporting your colleagues, not critiquing them.

I'm ashamed that I have to say this to a fellow teacher.

Your workload sounds pretty light if you're exercising outdoors during the school day between lives. Some teachers are live teaching for all five lessons plus form time.

If you're off out for a run rather than working then I'd suggest your whinging colleagues are putting in proper days work unlike yourself going out in the light and swigging wine whilst working.

EmmanuelleMakro
Your post smacks of superiority to be honest.
If you're a teacher then surely you would know that everyone has their own challenges, everyone has different family situations at the moment and each department has different pressures and responsibilities?
There's some people in any workplace that complain regardless of situation, but overall your post sounds like you consider yourself to be much better than your colleagues.

Your workload sounds pretty light if you're exercising outdoors during the school day between lives. Some teachers are live teaching for all five lessons plus form time.

If you're off out for a run rather than working then I'd suggest your whinging colleagues are putting in proper days work unlike yourself going out in the light and swigging wine whilst working.

Are you just being goady?
I disagree with the poster above on some things, but if I was at one of my former schools and following a normal timetable on Teams or GoogleClassroom then I could go for a run at lunch because lunch was an hour. It wouldn't make a jot of difference to my workload because I'd catch up later.

Unfortunately, yes you are being so unreasonable! I assume you don’t have any teacher friends and your only experiences of education are of being a pupil yourself and now your children as pupils?
If the only struggles teachers faced were disciplining kids then yes teaching from home would be somewhat easier (though I have still had behaviour and attendance problems during remote learning).
However workload has increased astronomically during this time:

• providing live learning for pupils who have internet & paperbased work for those who don’t has doubled the resources required to be made.
• not able to have pupils self assess their own work has increased marking demand (astronomically in my school as our pupils self assess in every lesson and we only usually mark homework and assessments).

-marking online work is difficult, much harder than paper work, especially when you get some submit it on a document you sent, some share a new document, some submit a photo and others submit several days after the deadline. -not seeing colleagues regularly has increased the need for emails, now receiving around 60-80 a day, and not having to have more meetings via zoom (or alike). -having to call pupils each week for welfare checks and seeing what further support we can give. I’ve got 15 calls to make every week, some answer others don’t that then need to be followed up by emails.

• having to teach from my home is actually an invasion of my personal life. I strictly separate my home and work life as teaching is notorious for being a profession where a work/ life balance is difficult. I find myself working longer hours (yet more unpaid overtime that this education system relies upon).

This is not an attack, and yes there are perks (no commute or queue for the microwave), however please open up and think about the other demands of our role outside of disciplining children. We have all entered the profession because we strive to inspire and nurture the next generation, discipline is a minor part of our job.

Oh, you have reminded me of another perk: the microwave at home is cleaner (I don't actually take food to heat up into school as there isn't enough time to eat hot food in a school day, but still, it's a perk?)

You seem to fixated on the idea that half of teaching is "struggling to keep them quiet". I do not have any issues getting my students to be quiet when I am teaching. I'm a secondary English teacher.

Teaching in a classroom is loads more fun, and requires less prep as you can approach things with nothing more than a question for discussion and a whiteboard marker.

The only good thing about it is the lack of commute and being in control of my own heating.

This thread is highly depressing, but I am interested to see how people perceive the difficulties of teaching.

No, I don’t have to deal with children at home messing with the Velcro on their shoes - but have you ever tried to persuade primary kids to do their work over the phone?

We can’t just provide the learning and then leave it to the parents, we’re judged on engagement levels. If they don’t engage, we then need to provide evidence that we’ve done everything we can to promote engagement. Everything we do is then logged and scrutinised.

@chinateapot

Not a teacher but DH is. Status quo currently is grim. All the lessons need rewriting- a lesson which can be delivered in school is not the same as a good lesson for remote teaching. Things as simple as the fact that you can’t simply cut and paste a worksheet from word into google docs because it messes up the formatting so all of those need redoing. They are delivering all of this from school and the reality now is that all the lessons need additional preparation as well as the keyworker / vulnerable kids needing supervising as well as delivering live lessons. So the workload has increased.

This 👆 It is taking me every time I'm not teaching, to rewrite lessons or make them more interactive. I am doing live lessons, so I'm talking for pretty much the entire hour. It is exhausting, normally I would set tasks, get the kids to work in pairs or individually and then hop around to see how they are getting on. This online stuff doesn't work like that unfortunately. I feel more exhausted and tired than ever. Also OP don't forget about teachers with their own families, who are teaching then supervising/teaching their own children. Most teachers I know have families.

Also I restart everything I say about 30x a lesson due to kids being kicked off due to WiFi or joining late. Then writing and talking continually in chat panes. As I'm lagging or whatever. Calling home, emails to parents and children. Then emails to department and colleagues, the constant CPD. I wanted to quit last week.

We have a 40 minute break in a school day. The additional break was dropped last year as we didn't have enough staff to cover all the duties of a second staggered break so opted for working straight through and finishing 20 minutes earlier. From 11.50 till 2.50 it's back to back lessons.

I perhaps was somewhat goady but given most of us are working non stop whilst simultaneously supervising our own children and still having to go into school for at least part of our week to support kw kids I found a poster calling her colleagues whingers and portraying daytime runs and wine drinking pretty goady.

Oh, where to start with this one!...

It's obviously entirely dependant on the school & individual teachers, but in my experience(Teaching Partner at a large Primary) it's an absolute bloody nightmare & our entire school body would rather be back to normal!

Our school is providing a full learning experience for the children at home (mixture of live lessons, recorded lessons, PowerPoint presentations, online worksheets/tasks), teaching in class for the ridiculously large number of supposedly key worker children AND before/after school childcare! All of our Teachers & Teaching Partners are on a complicated weekly rota which involves juggling all 3 of the above responsibilities (including daily marking, feedback, welfare calls) as well as, in most cases, trying to home-school their OWN children!!

Everyone is utterly exhausted, stressed to the eyeballs, anxious about getting sick &/or risking their own families' safety & generally just pissed off!

However, as is always the way, because my colleagues & I are absolutely bloody amazing, we all continue to pull together, plaster on bright, reassuring smiles every day, all day & provide the very best care & education to our children.

Believe me, none of us are having a jolly old time at home,on our laptops, in our PJs!!

Oh, & let's not forget the fact that there is now NO work/home life separation whatsoever & we regularly get arsey messages/demands from parents well into the evenings & all weekend, because we're now somehow more accessible & they're expecting more of us than ever...even though, according to Bumbling Boris, schools are closed!?!? 😡

In terms of people giving positives - isn’t it sad when we’re saying that being able to go to the toilet and get a drink is a positive. Both of these activities are basic human needs. It really shouldn’t be like this. I teach in a primary where all staff have been told they must be in school every day they work however I do not begrudge anyone who is teaching from home. It is hard on everyone at the moment - school staff, parents (many of whom are also school staff) and children. Be kind should be pinned to the top of every MN thread at the moment.

I can't believe some teachers are being made to record live lessons. My DC's school did this for a while and I thought it was pointless. It must have taken bloody ages for the teachers to produce the videos and the content was no different than was already available on BBC/white Rose (there are about a million videos on how to do division what's the benefit of the teacher wasting an hour making another one? etc. It just seems like it was forced upon them to make parents feel like they weren't being lazy. I much prefer what we do now. Some live lessons where the teacher explains, sets some work and is on hand to answer questions if the kids get stuck. It's fairly similar to actual lessons in school although obviously they can't do much practical stuff. It works really well and is less work for the teacher.

I have a 0.5 contract. Normally during term-time I work around 30-35 hours. This week I did 45.

HTH

I am a Safeguarding Lead in a secondary school. I have never been busier or more stressed in my entire life. I am in school three days a week, on these days I now have to fit in covid testing the staff and students who are on-site with all my other duties which means I get into school for 7am and rarely leave before 6pm. We have twice as many kids in school as we did in the first lockdown. The staff who are in school do not feel safe and when they are scared, overwhelmed and need to vent I am generally the person they come to. On the days I WFH I am juggling making phone calls to a long list of vulnerable students and their families who have to be contacted each week (these calls are often long and can be emotionally draining), attending Teams meetings and writing referrals to social services/CAMHS and other services with trying to homeschool my own DC who I feel guilty for neglecting. If the aforementioned parents of vulnerable students don't answer their phone I have to go out and knock on their doors, which as you can imagine isn't always well received. So many of our families are in crisis for various reasons and due to the pandemic it's more difficult than ever to access support for them, I often feel I am banging my head against a brick wall especially when it comes to trying to access Mental Health services for young people or parents who are suicidal. The fact that I am still responsible for the safeguarding of 2000 students even though I can't clap eyes on the majority of them feels extremely precarious and I cannot wait until we reopen fully. All that said, I would not swap places with my Teaching friends and colleagues who are spending all day delivering live lessons on Teams and I think they're bloody marvellous.

Yabu - keeping 30 children on track at home, answering questions and emails, commenting separately on every separate piece of work must take 10x longer than just answering one hand up or clarifying for the whole class in one go. My BiL is much busier, half the time in school, half wfh.

I do also think that the problem with these kind of threads is that often we're talking at crossed wires. The parents who post them tend to have kids who are at schools which are doing basically nothing. Sending a few links to BBC bitesize, not marking any work, not answering any emails etc. From those parents' perspectives teachers are doing nothing. This obviously isn't a decision made by individual teachers but it is the reality at some schools.

The teachers who comment are often coming from schools which are trying to offer a full curriculum at home. These teachers ae delivering live lessons which means adapting lesson plans. Marking huge amounts of work (where as at school they could wander round the class room in real time to check students know what they're doing or have students swap with another student to mark each others), they're also fielding constant emails from parents with technical issues, doing their stint at keyworker school, sending work out to students with no internet, recording video lessons, doing welfare check calls on students, chatting through concerns, supporting mental health issues etc. Of course if you said to one of these teachers that it must be really easy for them they're going to be massively disgruntled.

"but overall your post sounds like you consider yourself to be much better than your colleagues."

Yep. Perhaps you haven't come across this poster before. It's her Modus Operandi.
I've also seen similar attitudes from teachers who, ooh, I don't know, perhaps couldn't hack it on supply in the state system and so defect the private system.

But pretend to be state teachers when it suited their argument, Ange, that was the best bit.

TheHoneyBadger
I see your point.
I guess I've seen some of my former colleagues getting out in the middle of the day and know they're busting their gut in a state comprehensive so felt a bit defensive on their behalf.
Apologies if I sounded a bit arsey or grumpy

CallmeAngelina
Well doesn't that make sense. It's not a username I've paid much attention to.

Some name-changers have an unmistakable style. And when they continue to spout unpleasant and dismissive put-downs to other posters at the same time as blowing their own trumpet about their own (perceived) work ethic, it rather tends to stand out.

Hence my feeling annoyed and being a bit goady. Sorry.

Is it the one who is also a nurse on maternity leave teaching in a school? I may have mixed up two very similar personas there.

It reminds me of those women whose usp with men is their claim not to be like the rest of womankind

That's quite true.
I read a few posters who claim to be teachers but find it hard to believe they are as they only ever seem to post in the more heated education topics and their posts are so far removed from anyone's experiences of education that I know.