This is why I am not a teacher
Wednesday, 25. October 2006, 02:22:19
I love youth work, I'm in the Scouts, I help with Youth Club and I lead the Church Youth Fellowship and I go on summer camps with Scripture Union and Craigavon Christian Youth, but there are two reasons why I am not a teacher in the UK:
i) My mother is a teacher.
ii) The curriculum for computing is much too woolly.
iii) I don't really want to work for the government AND pay taxes
iv) No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Explanation:
i) Because of this I know that the job itself is crap. Working practices, resources, support and local government are all lousy. Any level of government, often parents and even other teachers will actively and wilfully prevent you from teaching. My mother is also much too honest and hard working for her own good. Which is why I am writing this post at 2am of a Wednesday morning. My mother has felt the need to make out (and print at home) worksheets, on the computer. That requires my help to get it right and because she is printing it at home, my printer and my ink so that her (home) printer doesn't run out before dad can buy another cartridge. I know many people would not do this and would not think about school after they left the gate at 4pm until they returned the next morning, but late nights (or no nights) is the general practice among teachers because they have so much marking, lesson planning and other admin to do. Plus mum does her printing at home because it is more convenient than getting it photocopied at school. This is ludicrous. Photocopying is for volume and anything more than about 10 or 15 copies of a document should be photocopied. The vast majority of classes have more than 10 pupils. But how could it be easier for her not to use the school photocopier? A couple of reasons: lack of photocopiers, lack of staff authorised to use the photocopier (singular), overzealous budgeting on the paper and too much spent on nonsense like digital whiteboards (which suck electricity very quickly and send kids blind if they stare at the lens too long).
At least the late nights for me aren't quite so common now. It used to be that when I was still at school, mum would have kept me up about once or twice a month to do typing for her until about 2am. Most often around the time the school was to have an inspection (utter uselesnes, I am not against inspecting, but I am against the type of inspection carried out in the UK at the minute). Perhaps I should charge my time time to the goverment, but it would probably be taxed.
Plus, mum has just started teaching a GCSE course in learning for life and work. Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to do a GCSE in learnging for life and work?
Anyway, in summary, my mother is a teacher, so I know what it's like and I wouldn't want to do it myself, even for a significant pay rise.
ii) Perhaps it was just my teachers, both were pretty easy to learn under but, I was not impressed by the syllabus at either GCSE A-Level. I got a grade A* for GCSE Information Systems. That is not a boast, it is an indication of how ludicrously easy the course was. It was also out of date, or perhaps it was our teacher, spending so much time on how dot matrix, daisy chain and line printers work. To me that requires 10 minutes and then one minute to say (even 10 years ago) nobody uses them anymore, not several lessons and pages of notes. That A* also rested on coursework that consisted of a really easy to make HyperCard application. Honestly, the only hard bit was having the will to type up the coursework report. At least we learned the Fetch/Execute cycle. But there was nothing more at GCSE level, and I've heard there is less now, that would inspire the next generation of software engineers that our country so desperately needs.
A-Level was better but our teacher jumped straight into solving quadratic and cubic equations without really helping us to translate between the problem space and the solution space (and Pascal has too many types of parameter). Plus we still had to cover dot matrix printers because GCSE Information Systems was not a pre-requisite. And the way was still open to rehash my GCSE coursework - yes, early HyperCard for the win in 1998! I freely admit to choosing HyperCard over Pascal for the coursework for reasons of least resistance. I didn't like Pascal and our Teachers didn't really have experience with anything else. So hypercard it was. Unfortunately not a mention of simple SQL, or much of proper databases at all, although I do remember we did normalisation at least and not a pip about object oriented programming, except to mention that C++ exists.
Really, nowadays, Computing syllabi for secondary schools could even take stuff from 3rd year university courses - especially data structures and their algorithms, thus leaving us more time at university to properly get to grips with concurent programming.
The short of it is: teaching is neither a good career move, nor good for your health and sanity. Current students: stay away until numbers of teachers get so low government has to intervene for better pay and conditions.
update: s/gst/get/
plus: I realised I should have bigged up the private sector, government can only do so much and should not be relied upon.
i) My mother is a teacher.
ii) The curriculum for computing is much too woolly.
iii) I don't really want to work for the government AND pay taxes
iv) No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Explanation:
i) Because of this I know that the job itself is crap. Working practices, resources, support and local government are all lousy. Any level of government, often parents and even other teachers will actively and wilfully prevent you from teaching. My mother is also much too honest and hard working for her own good. Which is why I am writing this post at 2am of a Wednesday morning. My mother has felt the need to make out (and print at home) worksheets, on the computer. That requires my help to get it right and because she is printing it at home, my printer and my ink so that her (home) printer doesn't run out before dad can buy another cartridge. I know many people would not do this and would not think about school after they left the gate at 4pm until they returned the next morning, but late nights (or no nights) is the general practice among teachers because they have so much marking, lesson planning and other admin to do. Plus mum does her printing at home because it is more convenient than getting it photocopied at school. This is ludicrous. Photocopying is for volume and anything more than about 10 or 15 copies of a document should be photocopied. The vast majority of classes have more than 10 pupils. But how could it be easier for her not to use the school photocopier? A couple of reasons: lack of photocopiers, lack of staff authorised to use the photocopier (singular), overzealous budgeting on the paper and too much spent on nonsense like digital whiteboards (which suck electricity very quickly and send kids blind if they stare at the lens too long).
At least the late nights for me aren't quite so common now. It used to be that when I was still at school, mum would have kept me up about once or twice a month to do typing for her until about 2am. Most often around the time the school was to have an inspection (utter uselesnes, I am not against inspecting, but I am against the type of inspection carried out in the UK at the minute). Perhaps I should charge my time time to the goverment, but it would probably be taxed.
Plus, mum has just started teaching a GCSE course in learning for life and work. Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to do a GCSE in learnging for life and work?
Anyway, in summary, my mother is a teacher, so I know what it's like and I wouldn't want to do it myself, even for a significant pay rise.
ii) Perhaps it was just my teachers, both were pretty easy to learn under but, I was not impressed by the syllabus at either GCSE A-Level. I got a grade A* for GCSE Information Systems. That is not a boast, it is an indication of how ludicrously easy the course was. It was also out of date, or perhaps it was our teacher, spending so much time on how dot matrix, daisy chain and line printers work. To me that requires 10 minutes and then one minute to say (even 10 years ago) nobody uses them anymore, not several lessons and pages of notes. That A* also rested on coursework that consisted of a really easy to make HyperCard application. Honestly, the only hard bit was having the will to type up the coursework report. At least we learned the Fetch/Execute cycle. But there was nothing more at GCSE level, and I've heard there is less now, that would inspire the next generation of software engineers that our country so desperately needs.
A-Level was better but our teacher jumped straight into solving quadratic and cubic equations without really helping us to translate between the problem space and the solution space (and Pascal has too many types of parameter). Plus we still had to cover dot matrix printers because GCSE Information Systems was not a pre-requisite. And the way was still open to rehash my GCSE coursework - yes, early HyperCard for the win in 1998! I freely admit to choosing HyperCard over Pascal for the coursework for reasons of least resistance. I didn't like Pascal and our Teachers didn't really have experience with anything else. So hypercard it was. Unfortunately not a mention of simple SQL, or much of proper databases at all, although I do remember we did normalisation at least and not a pip about object oriented programming, except to mention that C++ exists.
Really, nowadays, Computing syllabi for secondary schools could even take stuff from 3rd year university courses - especially data structures and their algorithms, thus leaving us more time at university to properly get to grips with concurent programming.
The short of it is: teaching is neither a good career move, nor good for your health and sanity. Current students: stay away until numbers of teachers get so low government has to intervene for better pay and conditions.
update: s/gst/get/
plus: I realised I should have bigged up the private sector, government can only do so much and should not be relied upon.
WIDGETIZE