Miss Frizzle, Reader's Comment, Hey politicians, leave those teachers alone, Jan

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Miss Frizzle, Reader's Comment, Hey politicians, leave those teachers alone, Jane Caro, The Drum, ABC News, 11 March 2013: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4565396.html Historical link preserved from the original page.

Teachers do not have the resources to meet their responsibilities.

Consider this...

You go to university for three or four years, because that's what it takes, and because you know that teaching is an honourable and necessary task, and because you want to help develop children into responsible and contributing adults.

But when you get into the classroom, you find children who -

don't know what they should, for their age, because their learning difficulty has never been diagnosed,
don't want to be at school, because nobody's ever shown them that it could be fun,
who are disruptive and even violent, because their parents haven't disciplined them properly,
and so on.

Your work requires you to address these problems (which are not of your causing), but denies you both the time and the authority to do so.

You also have to spend two-to-three unpaid hours most days outside the "normal" school day in class preparation or marking of homework.

And you have a salary that consistently fails to increase in line with inflation.

Then you are expected to get your pupils to pass a standardised test that completely fails to account for the different capabilities of your students, and when, as is inevitable, you can't get your class result to some largely arbitrary point, your job is imperilled.

Teachers today are routinely denied the resources that they need to meet their largely unmeetable responsibilities.

How can stress, disillusionment and, ultimately, their departure from such a critical work sector be any surprise?