Tell Me What It’s (really)Like To Be A Teacher

[LucilleBluth]

I have applied and been accepted for a couple of School Direct and SCITT places for 2022. I’m 40, I work in a special school in a support role and feel like now my own DCs are older that teacher training is something I want to pursue…I have a good degree.

I obviously work closely with teachers and have teacher friends… BUT MN is so so negative about teaching. Will some of you MN teachers tell me what you love/hate about teaching. Am doing the right bloody thing here?

Some people live it bit it's not for me!

I stuck it out for 15 years and could not face the thought of going back.
I detested the micromanagement, dealing with behaviour, the crippling workload, the lack of flexibility, the constant threat of Ofsted etc etc

I love being in a place where learning is champion, bloody love my subject, love it when the kids say things I hadn't thought of, when they are funny, when they genuinely make a stride forward in their understanding

It depends hugely on your role and where you work. I work at a large secondary in a pleasant area. Most of the kids are lovely. I've been teaching for 18 years with a 6 year career break when I had kids. I've got three of my own who are 17, 15 and 8, so no tiny ones requiring my constant attention.

I've been at my school for 11 years and I've built up a good reputation with both staff and pupils. That makes behaviour management so much easier. I work 0.8 and I find my day off helps a great deal with my work life balance. I'll be marking mocks tomorrow on my day off but that's because I'm busy at the weekend.

For me, the marking can be a pain in the bum, and sometimes I get really tired. But I really, really love my job. It's challenging, it's interesting, and it's so, so worthwhile.

I love it. But I gave up all of my TLR’s and being head of a large faculty to be a big standard teacher and I have no desire to do any more than that.

It’s hard. It’s time consuming and all consuming. You work lots in the evenings. I don’t work on a Friday night or a Saturday, but I do at least 2 hours a night Sunday - Thursday. Often more.

But, we get 13 weeks off a year and I make sure I only work for a few evenings in the holidays if I need them. We are paid well for what we do (especially higher up the pay scale) and we have a great pension.

And, 16 years in, I know when to stop. I know when, actually, good enough is good enough, even if it’s not the most amazing it could be. And sometimes that’s just fine.

It is both the best and the worst job in the world!

If you are in a good school, with a supportive SLT, it can be great. If you are not bothered about doing the absolute best job for the pupils and are prepared to cut corners, it can be great. If you are good at admin, it can be great.

I loved it. I still love it.

It is a sad fact, however, that those who move into senior management are often not fit for purpose and make the lives of those they are supposed to 'lead' a complete nightmare.

Brutal but brilliant. I think about work 24/7, work ridiculous hours and I am mega stressed, but I also love my job and am much happier than when I worked in an office job. I just wish I could switch off. If I could afford to work part time I'd be happy as larry.

A lot depends on your school. Some schools are toxic and it can be hard to leave as you have to give lots of notice. After 20+ years I've switched to supply. Less stable, less money but I'm no longer crying on the way home about spending my evening ignoring my kids and pleasing senior management.

I have been teaching for over 20 years and honestly now, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

If you like doing pointless extremely time-consuming paperwork that benefits nobody but is apparently crucial, after a day’s teaching every fat, then maybe it’s the job for you though.

Teachers are micromanaged and have no flexibility on what we teach, yet are still creating lessons and entire schemes of work from scratch rather than there being free (unchanging) documents to use. The top of the pay scale looks great on paper but don’t expect to get there in the world of cash-strapped schools. Why would a head choose expensive you on M6/UPS3, when they could have two cheap new teachers instead and cover two classes

You are also only ever as good as your last observation and if a head wants to get rid of you for any reason (usually because you’re expensive), they will find a problem, then come back for another observation and another, and another… I have seen so many teachers (always over 40) utterly broken like this.

Have a search in the staffroom board here.

It’s great
It’s awful
It’s draining
It’s rewarding
It’s thankless
It’s exhausting
The holidays are great
The pay is good (in London)
A good school can make you love it, a bad school can make you hate it.

Agree with it depending on the school you’re in. I’m lucky enough to do three days which is perfect for me, and I like my school/SLT a lot. I’m very happy in my job even though there are of course regular stresses, like in most jobs I imagine.

It depends hugely on the school and how supportive you're senior leadership team and head are but as someone who has done many years of supply in hundreds of schools I'd say such schools are getting rarer by the year and expectations of what and what falls into a teachers remit are continuing to rise year on year.

I wanted to teach since I was a child and despise being young, child free and going into it with my eyes open full time teaching broke me.

I now hldo several days a week and spend the rest of the time with my toddler it's a good compromise at the moment but if I ever wanted to go back to a full time job I think I'd get more respect and take home less baggage working in tesco. I certainly wouldn't ever go back to the classroom full time not even if you paid me 3x the salary.

Teaching is no longer a vocation it's an endurance test to see how long you can last until you suddenly realise one morning on the way to work you'd rather get hit by a bus than face another day in the classroom and there is more to life than killing yourself to try and complete the never ending to do list and reach the ever moving goal posts.

Love it but agree with poster above that salary progression is pants, esp in primary. I was called a liar on MN for saying small rural primaries often can't afford to pay any TLRs but that is what I've experienced, and it's very hard to get above M6, especially if you want to move schools. The oft-quoted £40k salary for a bog-standard classroom teacher is very far from reality in my area.

I’ve been thinking about doing the same in a few years. I also work as support in a special school. I absolutely adore my job, just wish we got paid more….. it’s the wage that’s attracting me to teaching but I’m not sure I’d enjoy it….

I was called a liar on MN for saying small rural primaries often can't afford to pay any TLRs

We have no TLRs in our 3-form school either.

We have a head and deputy both on the leadership scale. The deputy has a class most of the week as well and 50 other ‘hats’ (PP, assessment, ECTs etc). The senco has no SEN Allowance and no subject leads get a TLR-Literacy and maths are huge jobs! Most staff are MPS. Most also want to leave, and our SLT aren’t too bad!

It can be both amazing and awful, often at the same time!

I love that no day (or minute) is ever the same and it is never boring. I love my class of amazing individuals (and as I teach tinies they all think I’m amazing too which is rather lovely). I enjoy opportunities to be creative and create exciting learning opportunities. I love the holidays. I love making a difference, in some small way, and feeling like my job is worthwhile. I love the school I work in and the amazing people I work with (not all schools are like this). Now I’ve been teaching a while the salary is not bad, particularly as I work part time.

The things I find more challenging are:
Never, ever being finished. There is always more to do. This makes it very hard to switch off.
Not having the money, resources and capacity to meet all the children’s needs. This is heartbreaking and has got worse and worse in the time I’ve been teaching (bigger needs, less money, less outside support). Knowing what is needed and being unable to implement it. That is so hard.
Working most evenings and weekends. I mitigate this a bit by working part time but the job’s hours are not 9-3 whatever other people think.
Giving more of my time and energy to other people’s children than my own. Juggling family life in term time is very challenging. However the holidays are the trade off so it just about works.
The negative way the job is viewed by others is hard sometimes. I care about it a lot and it can feel quite hurtful.

I’m in my twenties- I love working with the children but it’s just utterly constant. Before 9am this morning I had to do a 40 minute SEND questionnaire, book a school trip and print and practice resources for an a detailed in class assembly that had been arranged by the powers above at the last minute. The above I didn’t have time do last night because I was in a child protection meeting. I have 5 other emails left to action in my inbox that I left tonight as it was parents evening so I’ll need to tackle it in the morning. I am middle management- took this role as it added mental stimulation and a bit more cash. If I wanted to get promoted from here I would have take a deputy role which would take me away from the kids, unless I am called down to give bollockings or gate duty. And that’s all equally constant too.

I’m aiming to leave in the next 3 years, because then I would have done my decade in the classroom.

I am looking forward to a job where I can do a day from home, and when I am in the office- I can make a coffee and switch on the computer without my heart leaping out of my chest about everything I need to do before the kids get in.

It’s honestly brilliant in its purest form- but the trips, the admin, the five forms you do for no reason, the manic school photo days, the preparing for shows, the parents wanting a meeting with you because another child called theirs a ‘silly banana’, flu nasal spray days, timetable chaos, unhelpful CPD, impromptu assemblies, the observations, changing displays, the mock ofsteds, filling in accident slips, the meetings planned and unplanned just make it so incredibly full on. These things need to be done, but I am just frazzled.

However- this is the nature of a school day and providing pastoral care and support for 30 children. It might have been doable when planning and education standards were on the floor- but now educational excellence and rigorous planning is demanded alongside all of the other duties. I want educational excellence, and I prioritise this- but I only have so much brainpower and a lot of it is spent finding lost jumpers and meeting with parents.

Hats off to everyone who can do it forever, I probably could if I burned myself out but I don’t really want to.

I love teaching, like the actual teaching bit. I hate the culture in schools now and the way so many people get managed out at the first blip. I developed lupus 20 years in (2017) and couldn’t work anymore due to my health.... in the end it was a blessing I had been doing it so long as I got ill health redundancy, but I saw younger colleagues with similar illnesses end up on capability and be dismissed. I guess that’s a quite specific gripe, but it exists as part of a bigger problem which is that schools aren’t very supportive places these days. I don’t think I’d want to be starting out now, but I guess that’s having done it for 20yrs. I understand why you’d want to do it just from a purely wanting to teach POV.

I tutor and do a bit of supply now and it’s much nicer, both fo my health but also because I just get to teach without any of the bullshit. My advice for someone going in is to do your best to keep a work/life balance and have limits for yourself (and stick to them!) the job never ends, so you have to set boundaries.

The crippling workload. Honest to god I've never ever known it to be this bad and that's saying something. The ridiculous micro managing , checking up on, toxicity of many, many work places.

the job’s hours are not 9-3 whatever other people think

Even friends that I consider intelligent and reasoned people have said to me that ‘surely after a few years in the job, you can recycle the same old plans, so why can’t you just leave at 4pm?!’

Most teachers are in by 7.30 in my school and leave at 5.30/6 every day. 10 hour days are fairly standard, plus doing a good few hours in the evening/weekends. Yet teachers are portrayed as workshy whingers by the press-this was particularly bad over lockdown.

I feel bad saying all this-I don’t want to put people off as we desperately need more people coming into the profession, but honestly, at the moment, it’s just fodder.

I would echo what others have said. Teaching is amazing and working with the students is the best bit. I like having the school holidays with DC and it makes family life throughout the year easier in that respect.

It's not a family friendly career though. In a good school with supportive SLT, it's hard but morale is good and you feel like you can get through pinch points. In schools with weak SLT or a very corporate mindset it can be horrible.

I've seen people leave teaching within the first few years and be driven to breakdown by the job. There's also a culture in some schools that teachers should be expected to sacrifice their own family and time with their own children under some pseudo-moral obligation to their pupils or school.

If you go in with your eyes open and a willingness to set your own boundaries regarding your family life then you'll probably do well. If you're prone to getting put upon then you'll either burn out or wise up quickly.

I'm support and a teacher once said to me they couldn't believe I did the job for such a small amount of money (compared to what they earn).

I pointed out I was support staff by choice, that when I finish for the day I have no additional work in the evening and that my work life balance is really good; I would not be a teacher for those reasons alone (and there are many more).

Many support staff have had decent careers and choose to have a job where they do their job and go home without additional responsibilities. For me, it means I can see my family, study for a degree out of work and still have enough down time that I can support a hormonal teen and one doing mock exams. Money is not everything!

What's a TLR?

I left teaching in July after 18 years and moved to a senior role in the LA. Similar pay to my final teaching salary (Assistant Head in a secondary). Higher level of responsibility. My work-life balance is so much better. I’m in a demanding role but I do it 9-5 and take a lunch break and go for a wee or a cup of tea when I want. If I work over my hours I record them on a flexitime sheet and can take two days off using flexi a month - that plus my holiday allowance means I’m not too far off school holidays anyway. I don’t work at weekends for the first time in 18 years. I’m not relentlessly knackered - there truly is no tired like teacher tired, I can honestly say that now I’ve experienced a different job. Teaching is very rewarding but there’s no way I’d go back to it. I love my life now and spending my evenings and weekends how I want, not marking and planning.

You'll never be bored and you'll never have the same day twice. Children can be challenging but also refreshingly honest, funny, thoughtful and full of energy. Sometimes even keen to learn!!

You'll get instant feedback and satisfaction in the most unexpected ways.

You've already been given plenty of negatives so I'll just stick with the positives. It's hard work but I don't regret my choice - and there are a lot of very nice people in teaching, doing their best. And a few who should have chosen differently!

It's brutal. I love my subject but I'm not sure I'll be doing this much longer. I've been in the classroom for 16 years and I've no idea what else I'd do, but I know I can't keep doing this.