How did your day
start? Did you walk in form the car park and have to deal with an incident
before you even reached the door. Did you find you day changed because of an
issue or an extra meeting tacked on that nobody could have predicted yesterday.
Did you get a phone call from a 'client' or have to deal with a fight (physical
or verbal) between two angry immature protagonists which took out your
lunchtime. Did you have to abandon your intended task because of changes to the
day forced by a late arrival to a meeting or surly disobedience over what
should be a routine task?
Remember that day when you gave a presentation, the one
where the audience listened politely and you could flow through it even though
you were nervous? Remember how tired you were afterwards from the strain of it,
now imagine doing that five times a day, different things each time, to an
occasionally delighted and attentive but sometimes disinterested and often
sleep deprived trigger happy audience.
Maybe your day started slowly as you shifted work around so
you could linger over that first coffee of the day or soften the impact a
little, maybe change your lunch round. When is your holiday? Did you book your
dates to take advantage of that super low season offer? Those precious two
weeks at the start of July when its half price? Or the last two weeks of
September somewhere warm...
Did you worry today because 10% of your measured output
statistics slopes off every lunchtime to smoke dope in an old factory and their
'home supervisors' are ineffective, and that 10% represent the difference
between you being seen as an effective worker and a failure.
Did you open the paper momentarily and wince when someone
who has NEVER taught a lesson in their life decided to hack your working
conditions around because everyone KNOWS, like DEEP DOWN IN THEIR SOUL, that
teachers are a lazy bunch of feckless cosseted over privileged and overpaid
wingers upon whose pampered shoulders sits the blame for the ills that plague
society.
In the past 7 years as an Educational Consultant I have
constantly challenged the 'Pub Man' view of teachers as undeserving of sympathy
and praise. I have issued invitations dozens of times to take people into
schools and arrange a work experience. As a teacher for 12 years I offered to
do a job swap for a week with many many critical people. Only one ever took up
the offer because he was investigating becoming a secondary teacher. After a
week in a pretty good school with much support, just trying it out, he went
back to his safe job.
There are good sound reasons for teachers having holidays,
in reality they are , especially for primary teachers, used a lot of the time
to plan and develop the next new ideas and cope with the often 'dropped on from
on high' new initiatives that need to be shoehorned into an ever more packed,
burdened and subject to random events day. I know teachers who work every
evening and at least one day per weekend and still always feel there is more to
do.
There are people who work harder than teachers in this
country, there are people who work in more risky environments, but they are not
in the huge numbers and constant pressure to conform / change and innovate that
teachers are. Look at the present number of people leaving teaching, or even
never starting having invested large sums of their own money in retraining or
studying.
Take care Mr Gove, your legacy may be a huge shortage of
teachers. Baker gave us Baker days as a common phrase (training days). You may
leave us with the epithet for why a promising talented person has thrown in the
towel even before they properly take up their position. "Goved"
