Many of my pupils have commented that other teachers "must be mad, or on drugs, or something", writes David Mingay.
Now, according to reports from the National Union of Teachers' conference, it turns out to be true.
Apparently, "one in three will have mental health problems at some point due to the stress of the job" and "drug addiction, eating disorders and obsessive behaviours are also common".
This would be terrible - if it really were the case that it's teaching, and not something about teachers, that is to blame. Here's why they claim the job is stressful.
Many of my pupils have commented that other teachers "must be mad, or on drugs, or something". Now, according to reports from the National Union of Teachers' conference, it turns out to be true.
Apparently, "one in three will have mental health problems at some point due to the stress of the job" and "drug addiction, eating disorders and obsessive behaviours are also common".
This would be terrible - if it really were the case that it's teaching, and not something about teachers, that is to blame. Here's why they claim the job is stressful.
First, over 70% of 139 teachers questioned in a survey said their "working hours were excessive". Teachers get 14 weeks' holiday a year, for goodness' sake, and a half-day off every week, and they think they're due a Stakhanovite medal!
Non-teachers, when they hear this kind of whingeing, are often heard to say "they should try getting a real job". I'm a teacher, and I agree. I used to have a "real job" (well, PR, which isn't really "real", I suppose), which allowed four weeks' holiday a year and plenty of unpaid overtime. So, being off for over a quarter of the year hardly constitutes "excessive" working hours, I'd say.
What else? Eighty per cent "were anxious about Ofsted inspections and ... the increased frequency with which their lessons were monitored by school managers". So they don't like people checking to see whether they're any good or not. Why not? In any "real" job, they'd be surrounded by bosses and colleagues constantly monitoring their performance.
What really gets my goat is the hypocrisy of it all. Teachers are constantly overloading students with excessive homework. And if the students don't manage to do it, instead of sympathising that they are "living in an educational reign of terror" (as one headteacher says of teachers), they give them detention, just to make the students' working hours even more excessive. If they inspect students' exercise books and find the work isn't up to scratch, ditto.
I sometimes make my students laugh by sticking my feet up on my desk, leaning back in my chair, and sighing: "Teaching - it's so stressful!" If teachers do find it stressful performing what is in reality one of the most pleasant and satisfying jobs one could ever wish for, they should get a new job.
Here's my solution. Forget "investing in teacher wellbeing", as one teacher-support charity suggests, and spend the money instead on increasing teachers' salaries, so that people who are a bit more robust and who have had experience of "real jobs" are drawn to the profession. And those who aren't up to it can go and get the jobs they would really rather be doing.
