Teachers are a funny breed. It can’t be denied. You get some really good ones that make you want to become a teacher. They just make it so damn fun to learn and make it look so damn easy to do. You get the crazy ones too. The ones who have personal vendettas against poor schmucks who don’t gel with them or who they just take a particular disliking too. You know it. The teacher knows it. The class knows it. Despite the fact that they are a weird bunch of humans, in the end it can’t be denied. You want them to teach your child how to read, write and do maths and you expect them to do it well.
So pay them what they’re worth and don’t get on their case about it.
You’ll know if you have a doozy on your hands. You’ll know because if you ask them questions about how your kid is doing in their class they can’t tell you. They should be able to though. They should know your child as well as you do because they spend as much time with your kid as you do. Five days a week. At least thirty or fourty weeks during the year. Minimum of five hours a day. So if they don’t know what kind of kid you have, how they learn, and how to keep them ticking over then you know there’s a problem.
And so something to remember. They’ve had to go and get a degree to be able to do all of that. I know, I know. These days almost any schmuck can get a degree for anything. But these people are trying to help your kid get a good start in life so that’s what that degree was about. They’re supposed to be able to pick out the fact that you’re kid can’t figure out which numbers can be put together to make the sum of 20, tell you why, and then tell you how it can be fixed. That teacher has to be able to teach your kid to spell words with the long a sound in it while being able to see those other slackers at the back of the class and keep them interested in their work. What. You don’t know about the long a sound in words? Good thing you’re not the teacher then.
This is what your kid’s teacher is doing during the day.
That teacher has to think about the best way to teach at least 20 very different individuals and make sure that they all achieve their targets. That teacher can’t just slap out the same lesson for everyone. That’s old school. That went out the window with the strap a billion years ago. That teacher is thinking about whether or not all the kids should build something to learn their new concept or do a simple worksheet to practice what they know. That teacher has to think about teaching in a way that doesn’t bore either your kids or themselves to death. It’s true. Honestly. Do you want your kids to be learning about the same stuff you did? That was 20 years ago. Some of it’s still cool. Some of it (and let’s be honest here, a lot of it) was deathly and put you in a wide eyed coma where you pretended to be awake. Why would you do that to people? Imagine what would happen when it’s done to kids.
That teacher teaches, looks after, cajoles, entertains, tries to engage your kids every day so that they want to come back and learn more. Then they have the unfortunate mishap to have to attend meetings, write reports, fill out a lot of paperwork, file that paperwork, do playground duties, take extra curricular groups and activities. Then there is that happy activity of marking. Don’t forget the parents. Some of whom are lovely and fantastic. Some of whom think they know more than the teacher because they were at school from the age of five till graduation, therefore making them experts. Who will come in and give that teacher hell for not turning their darling into a genius. Gosh. So much to do. So little time.
So should you find your local teachers going on strike and asking for better conditions and better pay they probably need it. You know what’s worse? A friend of mine recently decided she was going to move overseas and work any job she could get and take a small break from teaching. She found that she made the same, if not slightly more, in her overseas mundane desk job as she did being a teacher in a local school where she came from. Interesting. Plus. It kind of makes sense. When you want the best working for you, you pay top dollar. Why wouldn’t you do that to get the best teachers?