If you had your time over, would you still be a teacher?

[finn1020]

One of my teens is considering training as a teacher, potentially primary. For those of you who are teachers, if you had your time over, would you still choose it as your profession?

What are the biggest pros and cons? How easy is it to gain employment, and do you feel it pays ok with the potential for career progression etc?

All that sort of thing is gone. You're expected to be 'performing' all the time, and the kids don't get more than five minutes to concentrate on working without getting interrupted by some poor bugger bollocking on at the front or reading over their shoulder "live marking".

I do think that the performance days of teaching are gone - or I hope so.

My lessons tend to be:

1. some sort of quiz in silence whilst I do the register or we do whole class feedback together. I don't mark books often.
2. I teach them some new content or we read something together
3. they crack on mostly in silence.

I do think that the performance days of teaching are gone-or I hope so.

Nope!

I don't recognise that type of lesson!

Nearly 25 years (EFL / ESOL) and I still love it but:
Spent 5 years working on 3 different continents
Teach adults who want to learn
Teach in an FE college

Cons are :

crap pay in FE
No lunch breaks as no time
Stressful at certain points in the year
A LOT of paperwork that never gets looked at

If I had my time again, I would focus on my languages and go into translation or interpreting.

Sadly no I don't think I would. I worked half my career in secondary state schools in deprived areas then moved to an indy school where I've been teaching primary and secondary MFL for nearly ten years. Indy has other issues and pressures (including much longer working days and a much smaller salary than state - it's a small school) and both sectors carry a ridiculous work load which involves evening, weekend and holiday working. Of late I've become more mindful and have just firmly said to myself, no, I'm not taking work home, it'll have to wait. This has meant more marking in class as a pp mentioned and using my lunchtimes to write reports, grades, etc. If I had my time again I'd go into something else which involved using languages but a job which I could just leave at work. I regret the time that has been eaten out of my family's lives. My dh is also a teacher (as were his dps) and we talk too much about school and work. It's not fair that our dcs have had to wait around on parent evenings, training days; that on weekends they've had too much screen time whilst we planned our lessons. This is something which we want to avoid but it's not easy.

@Tw1nset I don’t recognise the type of lesson you’ve just described. If we (in primary) delivered that whilst being observed, we would be on capability procedure so fast we wouldn’t know what had hit us! I know secondary teachers who wouldn’t either, so 🤷‍♀️

In my school (and many others) not only do our books have to be marked daily, they have to be marked in great detail, and the children have to be given ‘next steps’ and then have to follow through on those ‘next steps’. This is checked thoroughly in the half term book scrutinies carried out by our SLT and we get a 2 page feedback sheet for each subject (it’s brutal!) These are cross-checked with our weekly planning (which you’ll recall has been handed in and also fed back on each week!).

Eg in the English scrutiny the week before Christmas, my books were taken with absolutely no notice at all (union guidance actually says we should be given at least 24 hours, but that rarely happens in our school, the Deputy Head literally just came in at lunch and took them off my shelf). The following day I got my feedback...two children hadn’t ‘followed up’ on next steps in November (both had been off all that week...we’d moved on by the time they came back!), one label was stuck in crooked (it really wasn’t...you would not have even noticed...I’m not even joking!), I’d used the wrong colour pen to correct a spelling error in one book in October (blue instead of green!), some children were not underlining the date, some children were not writing ‘on the lines accurately’ (SEND...they are not able to, it’s a target, we are facilitating this through interventions!). There was nothing positive even though every single child in my class has made massive progress on the tracker...more than ‘expected’.

Remember, the OP was asking about primary teaching...what some posters are describing is very clearly secondary. The differences are huge, not only in actual teaching but in the children you teach and how they learn. What @tw1Set describes about leaving A level sets to sit and read in silence, is obviously on a completely different planet to being an Early Years or KS1 teacher, where you literally don’t sit down from the second the children burst through the classroom door! They don’t stop, and neither do you! It is physically and mentally exhausting being in the lower key stages. It does calm down a little as you move into KS2, but you still don’t sit! And you don’t just leave them to read in silence...it’s very much ‘active learning’.

I hope the OP has found answers to her queries 😂

I have made clear that primary and secondary are different and the OP may consider secondary.

I run a department which gets some of the best results in the country- especially when for our ability profile, We are a few years between OFSTED but in internal observations I usually get outstanding across the board - even though we are not supposed to grade observations.

As a head of department I set my own feedback policy and actively discourage the marking as described by posters on here.

All of my classes would when appropriate just get on and work in silence. They need some training when they arrive in year 7 but they can all do it - as I said when appropriate

I find the pupil need to ask for help, encouraged to get back on task/do more/put their phone away etc for me to ever claim that they work entirely in silence, sadly.

northernknickers, your school sounds appalling and I would never work there or anywhere like it.
Glad to hear you are leaving soon.

@CallmeAngelina I totally agree!!
@northernknickers that sounds awful, I’m in Ireland where book scrutinies don’t exist! Nor does weekly planning!! We do fortnightly plans, they take up an A4 page (2 MAX) and then we have a monthly checklist (under which is two fortnights with a tick list alongside it. Hey presto...planning!!

@CallmeAngelina it is 😢 and I’m counting the days!

@lipperfromchipper That sounds much more manageable 👍 Wish I could work in Ireland!

@Lipperfromchipper I was thinking you must be In Ireland. I’ve worked as a primary teacher in both and there Is no comparison . Ireland is performing well internationally in the PISA rankings. I can’t say there’s any evidence that the particular ideology being forced upon English schools is yielding better educated kids.

I was thinking you must be In Ireland. I’ve worked as a primary teacher in both and there Is no comparison . Ireland is performing well internationally in the PISA rankings. I can’t say there’s any evidence that the particular ideology being forced upon English schools is yielding better educated kids.

I don’t get why the gov don’t make things more like they are in Ireland. It would probably solve the recruitment and retention crisis overnight! All they’re doing is making kids and teachers stressed.

It’s a very different system, not without its own problems. Government here is having its own recruitment crisis. We can’t get supply teachers and there’s a 2 tier pay scale which hugely disadvantages new entrants.
But no comparison to my old job.

I do think that the performance days of teaching are gone - or I hope so.
They have gone in my school. The focus is on good teaching day in day out and as long as staff are covering the department curriculum/meeting assessment expectations how we teach is up to us. SLT have made it abundantly clear they do not want any entertainment lessons or showcase observation lessons, just strong teaching.

Sadly I have a feeling this level of professional autonomy and respect isn't the norm.