Topcrumpet of Sydney, Reader's Comment, Full marks for teachers who make a diffe

snapshot 20140111 · 182 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.

Topcrumpet of Sydney, Reader's Comment, Full marks for teachers who make a difference, Dr Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist, The Age, 5 April 2011 http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/full-marks-for-teachers-who-make-a-difference-20110404-1cyir.html? comments=79 Historical link preserved from the original page.

New South Wales: Sydney teacher wishes he had become a plumber.

I have returned to teaching after an absence of 20 years.

The differences are profound.

Students these days -

expect to be entertained,
are disinclined to do things they don't feel like doing,
and, with encouragement from the media and their parents, are increasingly critical of their teachers.

If a student fails, it is now always the teacher's fault.

To make matters worse -

the number of students with extreme behavioural problems seems to be rising every year (it's harder to teach when you have to spend 40% of your time on damage control),
fewer parents are supportive of the school,
and senior staff, sensitive and almost cringing from criticism from parents and education authorities, are less supportive of ordinary classroom teachers.

The outcome of all this is "blame the classroom teacher".

I should have become a plumber - some social status, but much more money.