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'Defeated' teacher's open letter to parents about disciplining their children

Information Analyst said:
What's your personal experience of teaching, then?
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Are you seriously defending teaching being “the hardest job in the world”? Really? Nothing harder?

Sorry brain surgeons and astronauts! Sorry junior nhs doctors doing 100 hour weeks!

Sheesh, thought it was a sceptical forum.
 
Nuclear reactor maintenence diver. Reactor tech on a nuclear submarine. Commander of a nuclear missile submarine. Military test pilot. Reaper drone operator. A lot of military jobs, actually.

Salvaging a 55,000 ton cargo ship off the Alaskan coast is probably a harder job than teaching elementary school for a year.

Doctors Without Borders. Police officer in a major metro. Homicide detective. CIA interrogator.

Porn star, probably.
 
If kids being brats is a surprise to her, she's in the wrong field. IT people know users are idiots, medical people know patients are jerks, retail people know customers are terrible. To quote St Teresa of Avila: 'Suck it up, buttercup.'
 
lionking said:
I sense sarcasm.

It may not be the hardest job, but it is extremely demanding and accountable. I worked in senior executive positions and coped. I couldn’t cope with a school teaching job (adult teaching jobs are likely easier).
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I did it for five years in a third level private college, the students fell into three categories for me. The mature. I really liked those. They were trying to pick themselves up and better themselves. The genuinely bright. I liked those too. They couldn't help but shine. And the third group, Mom and Pop are making me do this but I don't care even vaguely. Those I had little respect for.

One of my tasks was to build an FM transmitter, a regular feature. Guess which segment of the class couldn't be bothered? The rest were out on the street trying to measure the range they could achieve, and returning to ask, can we do it again only better? The snowflakes were asking How can I get the grade without doing anything?
 
Giz said:
Are you seriously defending teaching being “the hardest job in the world”? Really? Nothing harder?

Sorry brain surgeons and astronauts! Sorry junior nhs doctors doing 100 hour weeks!

Sheesh, thought it was a sceptical forum.
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So you're fighting hyperbole with hyperbole? Teaching is not an easy job. It's certainly a lot harder that a lot of people seem to think.
 
Information Analyst said:
No at all. It's just that most people haven't got a *********** clue what teaching actually involves.
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Yes, many people don't have a clue but many are quite clued in as well. However my point is that the criticism could very well be legitimate no matter what experience the critic may have regarding a particular job so, while understandable, dismissing criticism based only upon one's membership of that group does not actually address the criticism. Only when the criticism itself is addressed can one see whether or not the criticism is valid.

And, like it or not, some jobs such as police or other governmental positions require input from those who are not a member of that group. Some teaching positions could be categorized as one such job.
 
Information Analyst said:
My wife is a teacher. Kind of hard not to be aware of what the job involves and the effect it can have, although since she went part-time and switched from senior to primary she's not quite as stressed as she was before.
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No one in this thread said that it wasn’t a proper job. Or that it wasn’t a hard job. What was objectionable was the laughable claim that it was the hardest job in the world.
 
mgidm86 said:
How many schools did you shoot up though? ;)
I read the article and I agree with a lot of what she says about parenting today. Hard to prove anything without data though so that's as far as I care to go.
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I agree also. Couple of good examples to support the claim. Letter grades not given out because the schools don't want the kids to feel like they failed. And kids who play soccer where the score isn't kept because the league didn't want the losing team to feel bad.

Then later in life when scores and performance count such as in work or applying for jobs and rejection occurs, you have generations of adults who as kids, were not taught to cope with life's realities. I can't imagine this is a good thing.
 
rdwight said:
Basically a finger wag at an entire generation of parents and children due to her few years of teaching what? 20-30 kids a year TOPS?
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What the hell makes you think a middle school teacher has 30 kids a year? More like 150. And they're all difficult, going through a rough patch in their own lives. I've heard middle schools called "hormone quarantine zones" or something like that, at a time when even the sweetest kids sometimes feel like it's their job to be difficult. You need black-belt people skills as you not only have to manage them, but also deal with parents and administrators. And as a new teacher you will probably be dealing with the most difficult students.

It's not the hardest job to qualify for, clearly. But in actual practice, day in and day out, managing all those personalities, coming up with lessons that now have to compete with the entire Internet in terms of student engagement, knowing that kids may be stealth-filming you? Any misstep, any time you start to lose your temper (or really lose it), any slightly cutting remark you make to a student - all could get you fired, or worse - lose the class - so you have to stay loose, very loose, while projecting that you're actually kind of uptight. You are on stage all the time. And the workload approaches infinity, I swear it does, at least for a new teacher. At least for a conscientious new teacher. And just in case you do get confident some reformer will come along and say everybody's doing it wrong. So yeah, in practice it's as hard as any other job I can think of. Unless you just don't give a fig.

I love it, I just can't do it full-time right now because that would really amount to probably 80 hours a week. Am I being efficient, working at a flat-out run every waking hour? Of course not. Does it help to second-guess yourself constantly? Nope. But every single day you will make mistakes. Every single day you will have moments when you're ready to give up all together. Every single day (or most), something will happen to make you like your job, because when it works with kids, it's amazing. But some will be psychopaths, some will be mentally ill, some will be abused children, some will be borderline (or actual) criminals, and you are directly responsible for the safety of all of them, all the time. You will be working with precarious group dynamics armed with little more than your wits.

I agree with you about the Facebook thing; I think that is bad form. She could have sent a letter home with the requirement that parents sign it. I understand the exasperation, but it was a mistake.
 
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Somewhat off topic, but the thing I've seen here in Nevada is the increase in class size. Middle and high schools here can have a class size in the 40s. That's a difficult learning environment.
 
Joecool said:
Couple of good examples to support the claim. Letter grades not given out because the schools don't want the kids to feel like they failed. And kids who play soccer where the score isn't kept because the league didn't want the losing team to feel bad.
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Do you have citations? I've worked in at least 50 schools and have never run across either of these.

Also in the second case, you're saying it's a league decision?
 
The Norseman said:
Yes, many people don't have a clue but many are quite clued in as well. However my point is that the criticism could very well be legitimate no matter what experience the critic may have regarding a particular job so, while understandable, dismissing criticism based only upon one's membership of that group does not actually address the criticism. Only when the criticism itself is addressed can one see whether or not the criticism is valid.

And, like it or not, some jobs such as police or other governmental positions require input from those who are not a member of that group. Some teaching positions could be categorized as one such job.
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The "problem" with teaching, though, is a that there is widespread belief that people "know" about it, simply because they were once school pupils. Most members of the public don't second-guess - for example - the work of policing, because most of them have had little if any direction interaction with the police in their lives. In contrast, many see teaching through the prism of their own experience of being pupils, and think that all there is to teaching is what they saw in their own classrooms. They didn't see the additional hours of preparation, marking, grade projections, targets, budgets, or dealing with social workers, the police, or whatever for the more troublesome pupils. They didn't see the constant threat of discipline or sacking due to loss of temper or a malicious allegation, or the need to look over their shoulder even about perfectly legal out-of-school activities that the rest of the adult population - including parents - never have to worry about. Rdwight's suggestion that the teacher who wrote the letter must have, in a few years, taught, "20-30 kids a year TOPS," exemplifies the wholly skewed view of teaching many people have, whereas Minoosh's response to it claim pretty much nails the reality.
 
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