Reader's comment, Graduate glut puts trainee teachers on the scrapheap, Anna Patty, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 2014
A Wanna-Be teacher talks to teacher Seano.
Wanna-Be teacher: How is teaching worse than other careers?
Seano: How many other jobs give you half an hour's notice, requiring you to drive up to an hour or more to work in a completely new environment where you get little or no support or help?
In fact in many of those places the reception from staff and students can be outright hostile.
W-B: But other workers have a difficult employment path.
Seanno: A newly graduated teacher can now expect to spend much of their career in a casualised workforce where they get no feedback, no guidance and no support.
That is not the norm in other professions.
W-B: And in most other jobs organising the day care for your kids would take an extra 2 hours of your day, plus your return trip would be during peak hour.
Seanno: Not on an ad-hoc basis though.
The casualization of the teaching workforce is a nightmare for people with young families.
A half-hour notice and you have to have your kids packed up and in care.
Families and kids thrive on routine.
Teachers without permanent work find establishing routines next to impossible.
W-B: I can see that the uncertainty of casual work is stressful, but I expect that over the longer term teachers do eventually find a permanent role, which should leave them with greater job satisfaction and certainly greater job security than in many other industries.
Seanno: Not true.
Few of the people I graduated with have found long term work.
Some even commute from Gosford to Sydney.
The whole system is rotten.
It just starts with the lie that there are plenty of jobs.
Seano
Readers' Comment, Graduate glut puts trainee teachers on the scrapheap, Anna Patty, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 2014
Teacher training used to be better organised.
In the good old days, those of us who wanted to teach applied for a teachers' scholarship which took us to university and / or teachers' college for a free education with a generous living allowance for those from lower-income families, as was my own case.
I applied to for a teacher' scholarship after some years in other jobs.
Once we graduated we were guaranteed employment but had to go where we were sent, often to very remote locations, as in my own case.
The only 'catch' was that we had to stay with the Education Department for a certain number of years or pay a financial penalty.
We were also guaranteed employment for life as long as we behaved ourselves and did a reasonably good job.
The supply of state school teachers was thus regulated.
An advantage of lifetime employment was that we could get on with the job without looking over our shoulders all the time to see if we were pleasing the greatly varying requirements of our 'superiors'.
Dave Morrison, Blue Mountains.