The Oracle Rants: Why teachers deserve more respect

Opinion from The Oracle Speaks
By James Thorpe

There are two reasons I decided to become a teacher. First and foremost, I was itching for the hollow sense of achievement that comes from making a series of sarcastic remarks to a child more than half my age. Secondly, and perhaps more relevantly to this, I thought it would be immensely satisfying, rewarding occupation, and one which would accord me a degree of appreciation and, dare I say it, respect.

However, if the experience has taught me anything, it’s that teachers rarely get the get the respect they deserve for what can be, after all, a tough, gruelling and emotionally-charged job. Allow me to illustrate my point by providing a little bit of background around my teaching career to date.

Having taught with some success at a secondary school which had a considerable middle class intake for several years, I felt it was time to flex my pedagogical muscles in a school with a somewhat different demographic. The pupils at my former establishment were a little arrogant and annoying, with a tendency to speak to me as if I were part of the help but generally I kept the classroom in order an managed to impart some mathematical knowledge.

Now, however, it was time for a fresh start to gain a little respect from pupils living in a bleak industrial town, rather than a collection of picturesque villages. I was hoping to educate pupils who would be bit more down to earth, a bit more like myself. More than anything, however, I wanted to prove to myself that I could cut the mustard outside the comfort zone.

The previous sentence forces me to reflect on two points; proving things to myself is a bad idea just like on the ski trip when I felt I was proficient enough to try trick jumps and I have never really understand the metaphor of cutting the mustard but I do like mustard so it feels like something I would do.

So with a spring in my step, a bucket load of ideas and enthusiasm to burn I turned up at my new place of work feeling that I was ready to make a difference. I was going to teach the world to add. At my old school the pupils had often suggested that rather then learning to add they were happy to just have the number of a decent accountant, but I quickly realised that cutting the mustard was not going to be as easy as I may have thought (metaphorically not literally), and that the unilateral respect I was seeking was in short supply.

By the end of the first day I had found out that the Year 11s did not like my equation bingo and that a collective reflection on the events at Saturday night’s party at Tracy’s house was far too important for me to interrupt with the inconvenience of trying to get them to understand algebra.

My dejection at my failure to enthuse the pupils turned into horror as I witnessed my first case of happy slapping at the end of my first day. Unfortunately I was the victim and the perpetrators were the PE staff. School tradition my arse.

All of which has left me with the distinct impression that teachers deserve much more respect than they get – not least from their happy slapping colleagues in PE. So where do I go from here? I am often told to think of the holidays and it’s hard to argue with 13 weeks off a year. That said, the dread of facing the classes of unwilling youths who think you’re an idiot can p*ss on the bonfire of any protracted period of holiday time.

It’s true that I feel a little ungrateful complaining about my lot when the rest of the country are struggling through tough economical times and I have relative job security (presuming, of course, that I don’t take the easy option and go postal).

I should also add that the respect I’m talking about is, believe me, nothing to do with having a better pension. Far from it, in fact. I find it easy to sympathise with the perception that teachers are bit ungrateful in protesting at having to make do with a super generous pension scheme rather than the precious super duper generous scheme they’ve become accustomed to.

I can certainly see their point but then I get suspicious when I see that the retirement age for me will be 68 expected age of death for a teacher is a little higher. Very handy to avoid a death in service payout and pay out only a few months of pension.  To be honest, I hope that won’t be relevant for me, as I’m planning on going insane long before retirement age. Any time in the next few weeks would be fine, but before I do so, is it really too much to ask for a little bit of respect?