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?

The bit with the children is mostly great but the job is ruined by the bulk of it being pointless paperwork as others have said. Pick your school carefully and don’t work full time.

@Howshouldibehave

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.

I’ve also been teaching for over 20 years and I find it really sad when I read posts like the one I’ve quoted. I’m in an academic, independent day school that can pick and choose staff and then treats them well. It’s busy and pressured but experience and age are valued, pointless paperwork is at a minimum and the kids are mostly great. I spend all day talking about books and have a fantastic bunch of colleagues who are also my friends. I’ve been there 17 years so I have built up a reputation with staff and students and that helps. Go for it but choose your school wisely.

I've been teaching for over thirty years. Look long and hard at what @Howshouldibehave and @PinkWaferBiscuit said. That's the reality.
It can be great if you are young and filled with energy, with no other commitments. You can climb the ladder quickly.
But, then you get to my age, gradually worn out with years of nit-picking from parents and students, being endlessly driven by heads of department who are determined for yours to set an example to the whole school (and adding to their reputation in the meantime), never mind the whole curriculum being thrown up in the air every five to ten years.
Holding on to your UPS or TLR can be a whole other ballgame. You have to go above and beyond, just to justify keeping your current salary, meeting goals which may well be beyond your control, such as exam results (I know I might be flamed for that, but it's the truth. Sometimes there are groups that have so many low achieving students that you can never get there). And new teachers, being so keen, are quite happy to do this for no extra pay...

Do I sound jaded and fed up? Yes, I am. But I've been around long enough to know that teaching is a long hard slog, not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not for anyone who thinks that the holidays make up for the time and stress that you go through in term time. It's well known that teachers often get ill in the holidays because they've been fighting to keep going in term time.
When you literally have to time things to the second every day, have no breaks that are long enough for you to eat, drink and go to the loo (thank you covid for rearranging my day), and some days you can't even do those because you are on duty, then you'll realise what the life of a teacher can be.
Don't get me wrong, I love the good sides of teaching. It's so rewarding when you see a student finally realising they can master a skill. It's the thing that keeps me going. But, it's not for anyone who isn't in it for the long game.

Having done a few previous jobs that involved little more than sitting in front of a computer, I love the fact that teaching makes constant demands on my interpersonal skills. I've never had a boring day in 20 years of it.

TLR= Teaching and Learning Responsibility. For example if you are a Head of Department you get more money with your TLR point (usually 2-4K depending on size of Department- English/Maths/Science top TLR - Art lower TLR for example)

Broadly speaking, people who:

• Have supportive families
• Are good at maintaining their own boundaries
• Are expert at time management
• Have sturdy mental health
• Are independently minded
• Love the children
• Do not care unduly about professional advancement
• Are good at keeping things in perspective
• Have a fantastic sense of humour

… enjoy teaching and are great at it!

And people who:

• Are perfectionists
• Are people pleasers
• Have fragile mental health
• Have fragile egos or self esteem
• Care about being recognised and appreciated by anyone other than the children
• Struggle with organisation and time management
• Take everything very seriously and/or personally

… Will not last beyond 5 years.

By and large, I stand by this. There are some schools with psychopathic heads (not even joking) where the former group are chewed up and spat out for their courageous individualism, and there are some incredibly lovely schools that can accommodate the latter category to an extent.

But generally speaking, if you aren’t in group 1, run for the hills.

@Lacroix11

Broadly speaking, people who:

• Have supportive families
• Are good at maintaining their own boundaries
• Are expert at time management
• Have sturdy mental health
• Are independently minded
• Love the children
• Do not care unduly about professional advancement
• Are good at keeping things in perspective
• Have a fantastic sense of humour

… enjoy teaching and are great at it!

And people who:

• Are perfectionists
• Are people pleasers
• Have fragile mental health
• Have fragile egos or self esteem
• Care about being recognised and appreciated by anyone other than the children
• Struggle with organisation and time management
• Take everything very seriously and/or personally

… Will not last beyond 5 years.

By and large, I stand by this. There are some schools with psychopathic heads (not even joking) where the former group are chewed up and spat out for their courageous individualism, and there are some incredibly lovely schools that can accommodate the latter category to an extent.

But generally speaking, if you aren’t in group 1, run for the hills.

100% agree.

I LOVE teaching. It was horrendous while dc were in nursery and I had an awful head of dept but now dc are both in school and have fabulous head of dept and head of school and I wouldn’t do any other job. I know I make a huge difference to my students every single day. I love being their tutor and getting to know them and I love teaching them about my subject. I find the hardest part is trying to be kind to parents who make the worst possible choices in life or who clearly do not want to be a parent at all. I do my best to pick up the pieces those parents leave behind.

Oh and by the way I am a self-confessed group 2. Not sneering at these people, just being honest! I left teaching after 5 years too.

Crucially, I worked in other industries before teaching so i know what it’s like to do a shite job just to pay the bills. And a job that makes fuck all difference. And to do a job with crap wages.

Children should be at the centre of all learning. It should always be questioned if a teacher is doing something, what is the benefit to the children (spoiler: a lot of the time, it's for SLT and OFSTED).

It's easier when you've been in a school for a long time; you know everyone, you know the calendar and you know the expectations.

I don't enjoy teaching too much at the minute as I am in a year group that I'm not passionate about.

It's exhausting, it pays fairly well and the breaks - when you are able to have a real rest - are a great perk. It's extremely hard at the moment with deep dives and there are a huge number of teachers leaving the profession as I'm sure you know. A lot of micromanagement too.

And why can't you recycle plans / lesson content? I'm interested

@Howshouldibehave

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.

All of this with bells and knobs and whistles. Did it for 20 years. Thought I would miss it when I escaped but I didn't miss one second. Every year in the first week of September I do a little dance of joy that I don't have to go back.Apart from one head teacher who was fantastic the rest were sociopaths.

Teaching at its best is the best job in the world. At it's worst it is hellish. Its main source of hellishness used to be difficult kids. Unfortunately there are whole other sources of hellishness these days, as described upthread.

I've been teaching for over 25 years now. The only 'proper' teaching job (I only do bits and bobs and supply now) I ever did, which had literally no hellishness, was at a private girls' day school. It was bliss. Literally no downsides (apart from moral questions about the existence of private schools).

I don't have to deal with the paperwork, targets, appraisals etc any more. But some of the kids' behaviour is pretty shocking.

@roarfeckingroarr

And why can't you recycle plans / lesson content? I'm interested

If you ask me most of what is tedious, pointless and difficult in schools is down to the ego of headteachers or other senior leaders.

Everybody wants to be ‘innovative’. Everyone wants to be ‘leading the way’. No school got to be Outstanding by doing the same thing they did five years ago or the same as the school down the road.

Bloody exhausting.

@roarfeckingroarr

And why can't you recycle plans / lesson content? I'm interested

Because every year you get told you have to review your scenes of learning, you have to add various things to them to suit the latest fad, you have to adapt them to suit the needs of the learners, you may be teaching a different year group from previous years. Syllabi also change for GCSE and A level.

Schemes of learning

If you are a people pleaser and have even the smallest difficulty with saying no and meaning it you will be worked to a breakdown and then managed out of your job. Run and don't look back.

@Lacroix11 quite.

@roarfeckingroarr

And why can't you recycle plans / lesson content? I'm interested

In some schools they do. We consult last year's plans in mine and see if it's something we want to do this year with this cohort. I am primary though and you can be moved every year so you might not be in the same year group, in which case you probably have an idea of how you want to teach your own version of that lesson.

Sometimes it isn't the kid's that get you down; it is your colleagues and the admin side of it all. There is never enough time to do everything so you need to prioritise. Good luck!

@Hunderland

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!

Do you really have no work to take home? I'm a 1:1 support, I get the equivalent of minimum wage (less in reality because obviously only paid for 39 weeks a year!). I do at least an hour a day extra at work and at least 10hrs/week extra at home just to be able to do my job. In my school it'd be severely frowned upon to turn up at your paid start time and leave at your paid finish time, whether you're a teacher or a ta!

I love teaching, but after 23 years in the classroom I have (sadly) decided this will be my final year. It is no longer worth what it takes out of me.
I think I'm a pretty good teacher, well respected by colleagues and have always had excellent feedback.
But, despite working in a great school, the pressures in the classroom are now to great.
I teach in UKS2. Over the past few years the number of children we have requiring individual support has risen, whilst the number of support staff has fallen. In my class this year, this has led to high needs children becoming very disregulated which has led to violent outbursts towards staff members.
I remember when you would only have one hour of meetings after school per week. This week I have meetings every day - a mix of staff meetings, planning meetings and meetings with parents whose children are on IEPs (these used to be in lesson time, but we can no longer have the budget to get supply teachers for these meetings). I also used to do 1 playground duty a week, now I do 3.
I am also having to set work for any children off with Covid (I have one off this week) - that has to be adapted to be done at home and uploaded onto Google Classroom, it adds on time to an already busy workload.
Add to that ever demanding parents (only yesterday I had a parent telling me she thought I was being harsh for making her child miss 10 mins of playtime, especially as they hadn't meant to do what they did. When I asked the parent to suggest a suitable punishment for writing f* in their English book 6 times and showing their friends they went quiet), the requirement to record behaviour incidents and meetings with parents and the ever present threat of Ofsted and it becomes too much.
I'm lucky - I can afford to get out before I burn out.

@AngelinaFibres

If you are a people pleaser and have even the smallest difficulty with saying no and meaning it you will be worked to a breakdown and then managed out of your job. Run and don't look back.

100% this!

The job itself (teaching) is fantastic. I loved the kids (even when they were tapping!!!)

It’s everything else: the government chopping and changing, the unnecessary paperwork, the bullying management , the exam curriculum with 37 poems and an essential C (this was back in the day),

I felt like I was in a baked bean factory sometimes.

If you can develop a thick skin and a clear boundary between work and home you may love it.