Well this spread further than I ever imagined!

Wow. I never thought that, that blog post would be seen by that many people. There have been over 100,000 views on that one post, I can’t quite believe it.

Of course, with that many views there are always going to be those who choose to be negative. I am a human, do you pick apart every human in the same way?

I LOVE my job, I love being a teacher and I love the school I work in. I work with so many amazing inspirational teachers and I feel very privileged to work in the profession. Some people, however, I feel are slightly confused and took my blog post to mean that I hate my job and I hate teaching and that I just want to complain about it. That is not the case at all. My letter was simply questioning the system. Therefore I would like to take this blog to answer the many questions I found in my comments.

Firstly, I feel that I should answer some questions about myself. Yes, I am an NQT – this means Newly Qualified Teacher. I am at the end of my NQT year and have had my own classes for a year now. I don’t just stand at the back of a classroom taking notes! I have worked in education for 5 years under a number of guises – LSA, TA, cover supervisor, instructor and admin assistant…the list goes on. I am certainly not ‘new’ to working in a school. I haven’t stepped fresh faced out of university onto a PGCE course. I studied through the Open University, I have £0 under-graduate debt, and I worked in a school whilst studying for my degree. I then completed a School Direct QTS course, I gained my PGCE through Edge Hill University. I was educated under a Labour Government, I was taught to the test. My English lessons consisted of memorising quotes from ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘Paula Brown’s new snowsuit’, and ‘Flight’. I spent those lessons analysing texts and annotating my anthology. This leads onto my second point.

My punctuation and grammar are far from perfect. I apologise for that. However, making a few mistakes does not make me a ‘bad teacher’. Yes, all teachers are teachers of literacy. But no, I won’t be getting out my standards file and throwing it in the bin and quitting my job. I am far from perfect. It is not helpful telling me to quit my job because my grammar doesn’t quite fit their expectations. There is more to teaching than just grammar and punctuation. If you would like some experience of teaching I’m sure there are a lot of teachers who would love to open their doors to you. Feel free to see how it really is. Like I said before, I’m not ‘hating’ on teaching, I’m worried about the system.

I am a Geography teacher, but I do not know everything about my subject. I am still learning, I am modelling the learning process and I enjoy increasing my knowledge. Should I not be a teacher because I have gaps in my knowledge? Learning is an ongoing process – it should never stop. If a child understands the process of eutrophication, but yet misses a comma or apostrophe I would never tell them that they shouldn’t be studying Geography because they can’t punctuate a sentence properly! What angers me even more is that some of the people saying these things are teachers! It saddens me that instead of being helpful you are tearing teachers apart. Well, thank you for that! As I mentioned before, I am also human. I am not a robot, I did proof read this piece – yes I made some mistakes, and those have been corrected. Thank you to the people who were helpful rather than hating!

As for the teacher bashing, well…did I make any comments on other jobs? No…I did not. Lots of people are very quick to teacher bash. I know that there are people who work a ridiculous amount of hours for the same money as me, if not less. One of my closest friends is a nurse. She worked hard through university and is now being stretched in every direction. She is underpaid and overworked. The majority of my friends are in the armed forces, they are incredibly underpaid. All of this is unfair. My blog post was written to put across the fears that many teachers have. I could re-write this for a whole host of jobs that are unfairly paid. I work hard, I’m sure you do too. I know that everyone is facing cuts and life is tough on so many people. I know that there are many people who work incredibly long hours, I teach their children! I know that I get a teachers pension and that I’m fairly well protected. I know that in the Private Sector they have their own troubles and that life isn’t rosy there either. My point, which seems to be lost to some people, is that we cannot provide a ‘world class’ education system when morale is so low amongst teachers. We need promises. We need an education system which fits the children that we teach. A school is not a factory, it does not produce identical items day in, day out.

I do agree that we should extend and challenge our students, but I strongly believe that we should be the ones who decide how we should be challenging them. We should also be setting them up to be successful in whatever they decide to do next. An EBACC doesn’t suit everyone, it most certainly should not be a measure of success for a student or for the school they were educated in. If some of my students get to Year 11 being able to tell the time, follow a timetable and socialise with others I would be ecstatic! There will be some children who leave Year 11 without 5 GCSES A*-C. That’s life I’m afraid. Those children may be exceptionally creative, good with their hands and logical, they may have the most amazing minds and they will go on to be successful in a number of other ways. Our education model just doesn’t fit them. But trust me, teachers have tried every pedagogy, every tactic and they have spent a lot of time trying to push students to get those grades.

In terms of my working hours – I have worked weeks of more than 90 hours. Here’s the thing, every teacher has differing amounts of pressure and work to do. Not every department is the same and we all have different things to do and different responsibilities. Not every week is 90 hours, but when I start work at 7am and leave at 6pm and then continue at home…those hours soon mount up! I do not have my own children, so I do spend large chunks of the school holidays working, improving my practice, researching, creating SOWs and marking. As this is my NQT year I have had to create a lot of resources from scratch, especially for my A Level and IB classes. Of course I have scoured the TES and other sites to help me, but for the exam board we use the help is very limited.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me, I am asking you to consider our education system and the people in it. If you don’t like reading about teaching or education then don’t read the blog posts. No one is forcing you to. I am putting across my fears about teaching and the future. Yes I could go and get another job but as I previously mentioned I love teaching and I love my job, I just don’t love the system.