Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem

• Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  In my opinion this is a bigger problem than pay

  100% this. I am not myself a teacher, but I’m very close to a large number of teachers, and I don’t think pay would rank in even the top 5 problems with the job. I’m not going to claim my list is comprehensive (there may be other equally- or more-important factors beyond the 5 I name), and it’s not necessarily in any particular order (except that each of these is more of a problem than pay):

  1. The expectation of using their own money to pay for classroom resources
  2. The time worked
  3. Class sizes
  4. Student behaviour
  5. Administrative burden/curriculum bullshit

  1. Teachers I know regularly spend their own money on stationary for their classrooms, on print-outs of worksheets, on posters and other educational decorations around the classroom. Some schools do better than others in this regard, but it’s not uncommon for teachers to be given “print budgets” which are wildly unrealistic with respect to how much printing they need for their classes.

  2. A common refrain from people opposing the increase of teachers’ pay is how short the hours they work are. This could not be further from the truth. In my job, I work 9–5 and never think about it outside of that. I have never met a teacher who can say the same. They bring it home with them, constantly, and it becomes even worse around report card time or parent-teacher meetings.

  3. Class sizes in Australia seem to have a limit or average hovering around 24–28 depend on age and state. That is much too large to be effective, and only adds to the amount of their burden with many of these other factors.

  4. Teachers should be able to spend their time teaching. It is not in their core job to manage the behaviour of naughty children. And yet all too often, that is what they are expected to do. The extent of bad behaviour in classrooms is a huge indictment on the parenting and on broader cultural/societal factors. And it is not fair to expect teachers to fix this, or to the other students to have their learning interrupted because of this.

  5. Being forced to teach to a curriculum can kill a teacher’s love of their subject and of teaching it. It can stifle their ability to tailor lessons to what works best for their students, which in turn kills their ability to inspire a love of the subject in their kids. On top of that, they’re often forced to do all sorts of useless administrative tasks

  It all comes back to the same thing: that society does not treat teachers with the respect they deserve. Students don’t respect their teachers. Parents certainly don’t treat them with respect. The government screws them around on working conditions and classroom funding. Which is all so frustrating, because teachers are, bar none, the most important occupation we have.

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  • ShrimpCurler@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s a good list, except I would have thought that number 4 is an important responsibility for teachers? Probably the most important thing kids need to learn is how to behave in an acceptable manner. We can’t rely on all parents to be able to do that unless we start putting draconian restrictions on parenting. So, it has to be part of teachers jobs.

    Maybe there just needs to be better processes in place to handle problematic children, especially in high school.

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