New teachers feel emotionally unprepared: study

BEGINNER teachers enter schools underprepared to deal with the emotionally taxing reality of the classroom.

This leaves many with high levels of stress during their first year of teaching, with some reporting that they can’t wait to get home and cry, a study by two North-West University (NWU) academics has revealed.

Carolina S Botha and Julialet Rens, from NWU’s School of Psycho-Social Education based on the Potchefstroom campus, conducted their qualitative study among 100 beginner teachers. They interviewed the participants. Titled “Are they really ready, willing and able? Exploring reality shock in beginner teachers in South Africa”, the study appears in the South African Journal of Education.

The stress beginner teachers go through resulted in many doubting their readiness for the classroom.

“Participants wondered if this lack of readiness was a personal state, or merely indicated that they were not ready for the contextual realities of the school to which they were appointed.

“This lack of readiness placed strain on their vision as they started to doubt the compatibility of their own vision with that of the school,” said the study.

The “reality shock” came in the form of various dynamics in schools, including the heavy workload and the poverty of some of their pupils.

Stressed by the workload, one teacher told Botha and Rens: “It is always an issue of quality versus quantity. And in my life, quantity is currently in the driving seat. Some nights I come home and just want to lie down and cry, because I have so much that needs to be done in so little time.

“I do not like leaving things till the last minute. This makes the emotional part of teaching much harder.”

Another teacher said she found herself “simply thrown in the deep end”, referring to the workload.

Said another: “In less than a year I had to switch from being a creative English teacher to a rigid accounting teacher.”

The socio-economic position of the pupils also gets to new teachers.

“Somebody should have warned me that a teacher needs a strong heart,” said one. “You are constantly being overwhelmed with emotion – a hungry child, a child without shoes, parents having difficulties, a child struggling to learn. Everything evokes emotion”.

Some felt their university failed to teach them how to handle pupils.

Teachers in the country have for many years been complaining about the lack of discipline among pupils.

Many teachers were confronted with overcrowded classrooms, a reality they felt they were not prepared for.

“University taught me the academic content. It did not teach me how to work with pupils, how situations were going to affect me and how to handle these things without becoming negative about teaching,” a teacher told the academics.

Botha and Rens recommended pre-graduate programmes that focused on emotional support, “fostering emotional health and a pedagogy of selfcare”.