What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

MINDSET FLOW AND EBB

TEACHING GOOD, TEACHING BAD

I used to think that teaching and educational leadership at the school level of fantastic occupations. Indeed, back in 1967, I was ever so glad that I had a Western Australia Education Department Living Certificate, equivalent to year 12 secondary school graduation.

I was ever so glad because this was a ticket that I needed to be able to go into teacher’s college at the beginning of 1968. I have worked for years on our family farm and decided that farming was not for me. Without that certificate, I would have been on the farm forever.

I began teaching in 1970 and retired in January 2012. my journey along the pathway of teaching and educational leadership is for another time: suffice it to say it was a career that I enjoyed and was ever so glad to have undertaken.

Fast forward to 2023, and I have had a radical mind change about the value on the worth of teaching. These days, I would be very reluctant to commence a career in the classroom; nor would I be about to offer advice to others that it should be an occupation of first consideration for those thinking of the future.

Parent and community respect for teachers has fallen.

Student behaviour has slipped and their motivations for learning significantly declined.

Increasing administrative accountability is more important than teaching itself.

Katie Performance Indicators, assessments of teachers, have a disproportionate and system-required priority.

The gap of understanding between schools and departmental administrators is ever-widening.

Teachers have become responsible for the upbringing of children.

Teachers believing grammar, spelling, handwriting and an inherent mathematical understanding are important, and increasingly discouraged by a system where these things are being set aside.

The impact of student anxiety caused by the uncertainties of this modern world are increasingly harder for teachers to counter and explain away any sense of justification.

The curriculum requirements are ever more crowded.

Teaching is becoming an even more dangerous profession for male teachers.

Too much superficiality is required of teachers and teaching from the heart is discouraged.

The permanency of the teaching profession has all gone. Within five years of graduating, Close to 40% of teachers have given up and left.

Tensions, anxieties, ill health, mental health issues and our characteristics teachers have to deal with full students and themselves.

Increasingly, appreciation for teachers (the Boquet’s) is drying, while at the same time criticism, much of it nastily expressed through social media and demanded of teachers by the system (the brickbats) is burgeoning with exponential increase.

Then, teaching was good.

But that is now past tense.