Shebs, Reader's Comment, A little respect: attracting top teachers is not rocket

snapshot 20140111 · 235 words · 1 min read · Wayback

Uses your browser’s built-in speech (en-AU when available).

This page contains cleaned historical text recovered from the former Bad Apple Bullies website. Character encoding, punctuation, headings, lists and obvious extraction errors may have been repaired for readability. The underlying claims and opinions remain those of the original author and have not been independently reverified. Listen uses on-device text-to-speech — no audio files are stored.

Shebs, Reader's Comment, A little respect: attracting top teachers is not rocket science, Jane Caro, The Drum, Opinion, ABC, 4 October 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4293550.html Historical link preserved from the original page.

School principal: I work very long hours.

I have been teaching for nigh on 20 years.

Before that, I worked in industry and achieved a trade in the same industry.

In the 10 years I worked in industry, I was never home later than 5pm, and never on site before 7.30am.

Whereas teaching, I am always at school before 6am (often around 5am), and leave school soon after 5pm.

Lunch happens usually around 4pm, when the 'excitement' slows down, and even then it is usually a sandwich on the run.

And I do this 6 days a week, 44 weeks a year.

When the school gets vandalised, or set on fire (as has happened twice recently), I am the one called to deal with it; regardless of what time of the day or night this happens.

Everything at my school may look calm and graceful on the surface, but there is a lot of very busy work happening under the surface to keep the façade operating.

I look at my staff, and there is no one under 40 years old.

Where are the younger teachers?

Who will teach my students, your leaders of tomorrow, when dedicated people like my staff and I have gone?

I weep for this state, and this country.