Teaching OMG!

[LucilleBluth]

I have been training to teach this year. I started my PGCE as a 43 year old in September 2024. I’m about to finish it-well I say that. I’m feel like I’m hitting rock bottom with two weeks to go. I have worked in schools as support staff before so I wasn’t totally blind and I have good friends who are teachers, but oh my god, it is such hard work. The workload is insane-the kids are lovely but I’m dealing with so much extra stuff like SEN, EAL is off the charts, behaviour, kids without equipment and who can’t cope unless a lesson is chunked and scaffolded so much I may as well spoon feed it.

I don’t feel I can do it full time so I applied for a Cover Supervisor role-15 qualified teachers applied for a £21000 year job, I,didn't get it. What’s the point

Teacher pay needs doubling. I’ve been awake since 1am.

I guess if you don't see kids as individuals then it inevitably will become boring.

your opinion was fine, you found it boring.
You find all jobs boring.

Still doesn't excuse your snipe.

The pp had an obvious snipe that anyone who found it boring was obviously just trotting the same stuff out again and again. Utter nonsense.

And then another snipe here ^^

But y’know people can snipe if they want it’s a free country 🤷🏻‍♀️

Neither of those comments are ‘snipe’ @Teateaandmoretea
Lessons are not boring if you change the topics/way you approach topics and if you see, and respond, to pupils as individuals. It’s highly likely that if you found it boring you didn’t do the former and you’ve already stated you didn’t do the latter (‘clones’).

Utter nonsense. And total snipes/ assumption.

Teachers are very odd, they moan but then when someone actually criticises the bit of the job they like (because they do and that’s fine) there is a really strange immediate defensiveness.

I’d gone through threshold I was a good teacher, had good relationships with the majority of kids. But I didn’t really enjoy it. Possibly part of it was that I had to teach a second subject I was a lot less interested in for about 1/3 of my timetable - that might not have helped. But the fact is for whatever reason I did get bored. As above I’m very glad you didn’t.

It's not a snipe, you literally said that you saw the children as clones of each other.

And if you do that, teaching will inevitably become boring. It is a response to what you said.

Being bored of the job and being bored whilst teaching a lesson are different. It is impossible to be bored while actually teaching because you are doing a million things at once. But I can completely understand being bored of teaching. The fads coming and going ... The same old issues year after year ... The same dramas over the latest craze... The same "new expectations" led by a shiny new (young) SLT...

You are reading it very literally. The behaviour patterns were what was cloned. If you teach long enough you start meeting kids who have very striking similarities to ones you’ve previously met, it was something teachers discussed. Possibly people who thrive on this like teenagers more than I do or are more patient. Or as above don’t have to teach ICT when they have zero interest in it. I’m not perfect and would never pretend I am but the reactions above were odd. Every Monday in my last year teaching I had 4 lessons of it one after the other 😂😂 😱. And it was really dull.

As a maths teacher I certainly have the chance to get to know my pupils a lot better than teachers who teach them once a week. I’ve taught for 20 years and still had kids this year unlike any I’ve taught previously.

Well absolutely, it’s not the same job for everyone.

If you choose your school carefully it can still be a wonderful job. 30 years in here and switched from State to independent. I work hard but it’s not bonkers and I keep evenings and holidays free.

One problem is that people stick in the best schools, and the jobs appear in the others :-(

The pp that I was replying to said that they taught the same thing day in day out unless they were forced to change it.
So not a snipe.
But you do you.

Switching from state to independent is what lead to me suffering burnout and having to give up altogether. It’s not always the answer. It’s more about the school ethos and leadership than where the money comes from.

"Mainstreaming" is the biggest gaslighting going. ESN kids need specialist teachers. They need small class sizes. Never mind though, because nobody wanted to vote for that or pay for that so let's re-frame it. Let's just lob them in with all the other kids, chuck some 25 year old on £90 a day before tax in as their "Support" and if you object to that "You're being elitist."

Ever wondered why that Special Needs kid never makes a sound during any lesson unless they completely meltdown? It's because nobody wanted to face the fact they they needed almost one-to-one care and absolutely nobody wanted to pay for it. So let's all say no, one-to-one care marginalises them ...

Sorry, but the state school system is dogma-lead bollocks. It fails exactly the children who need it most. And it deprives the majority of the education they're entitled to.

@NotMyKidsThough Are you aware what ESN stands for? It's a very offensive term in the UK and not one used any more so hoping you are not British.

I'm hoping a typo for SEN? As the rest of the post was pretty spot on imo...

@napody Sounds prejudice in parts to me. I wonder if she has any children with additional needs? And absolute rubbish about 1:1 SEN TAs all being young and inexperienced!!

I didn't see it as criticism of the TA although I agree 'some 25 year old' sounds dismissive. The main point was about cost cutting. Do you think staffing ratios matter? Because the drive over the past couple of decades has been towards reducing them, and I agree this has had a detrimental effect.

I reckon the issues are:

• worse behaviour & parents who don't support the school to enforce better
• kids who've been helicoptered over & lack resilience/grit/perseverance
• kids with more learning difficulties in mainstream who in the past would have been in special throughout
• higher expectations of the lower end of the cohort. When i was a kid there was a bottom 20% or so of the class who were basically written off, they weren't expected to achieve much. Now teachers are expected to sacrifice everything in a bid to stretch every kid to reach a minimum standard.
• more challenging curricula at an earlier age in primary - alongside more SEN kids in mainstream who can't even access it without massive scaffolding from adults. There's also fuck all funding available for this now.
• more assessment and paperwork for teachers, planning lessons, constantly changing curricula, echps and support for sen kids. An expectation that you will review the data on your class and adapt your practice constantly. Lots of primary teachers are great at engaging kids in a busy classroom but they might be much slower at all the paperwork/tech platforms, its a different skillset & a different job, not many people are fabulous at both.
• in upper secondary, fewer alternatives to academic pathways.Loads of kids used to just leave at 15/16, maybe they had a handful of low grade gcses at best, mostly they didn't, who then went into hair & beauty, childcare, gym instructing, trades, armed forces or simply factory/warehouse work. There seem to be fewer of these routes accessible now.

@napody Budget cuts in education are truly horrific, and just one of the reasons why I left work in mainstream primary after 20 years in last year.
I am an experienced qualified teacher, but after mat leave in 2020 returned to the classroom as a 1-1 SEND HLTA whilst my daughter was a baby/toddler. I definitely wasn't 25 (40!) but the pay was truly shocking as is nearly always the case for support staff.
However, changes in budgets meant that my job over time went from 1-1 SEND support, to bigger group SEND support, and then pretty much full-time full class cover for teacher absences (on HLTA rate - no way were they going to pay me as a qualified teacher!!)
I am now an EOTAS Tutor working with the most vulnerable children in society, most often in care homes, but sometimes in homes. All of the children I support have an EHCP, significant additional needs e.g. Autism, ADHD, SEMH, attachment disorders, pervasive anxiety etc, and are not able to currently access any educational setting for many different reasons.
I love my job but there are very few of us around...I am paid far, far less than had I stayed in the classroom, no holiday or sick pay, no colleagues, terrible pension and absolutely zero job security. God forbid I ever get sick as I simply could not afford to pay the rent.
Still, I dearly hope I am making a difference to the children and their families who have often been let down so appallingly by an increasingly failing and broken system 🙏