(The Nationalist, 7 June 2002)
Although I have never taught in school and have no axe to grind on behalf of teachers, I cannot help but feel sympathy for them. Consider the following real-life examples:-
A boy uses a mobile phone in class. The teacher takes it from him, instructing him to collect it before going home. For whatever reason, the boy doesn’t. The next day the teacher is confronted by an angry parent who wastes no time in going for the jugular: ‘You stole my boy’s mobile’.
A teacher in a metal-work class has a piece of metal flung at him by one of the pupils. The parents are called in. They confront the teacher with a blank wall of denial, ‘Our boy wouldn’t do a thing like that’.
A small child cuts her leg on the playground. Who is going to clean the cut and put a plaster on it? Not a teacher, but two teachers, each one to protect the other from a possible accusation of child molestation. And who is going to substitute for those teachers while they are doing that job? If they leave their classes unattended, there may be legal and insurance implications if something goes wrong while they are away.
In the early weeks of a new school year, when the hard and stressful work of devising the timetable for a post-primary school has been completed, taking account of all the permutations and combinations that have to be considered, an angry parent phones a teacher at home, near midnight, to demand that her daughter be allowed to change from one subject to another. This follows a family row about the daughter. The teacher points out that it is near midnight and that these are not school hours. Abuse follows, and accusations of not caring. The teacher explains that the class which the child wants to join is already full, and that any new pupil will take them over the limit for class sizes. This will necessitate getting a new teacher, and re-structuring the school timetable. (You can never make one change to a timetable; any change sets off a chain reaction.) The retort from the parent is ‘That’s your job!’
And how often do we hear discussions on social problems concerning children end with the demand, sometimes petulant, sometimes aggressive, ‘Why don’t they teach them these things in school?’
I occasionally wonder if some of the behaviour we hear of from teachers, not all of it mature or well-considered, is not a reaction to a justifiable sense of not being appreciated, of being used, of being made a scapegoat for the deficiencies of parents?