CLASSROOM CRISIS
Teachers are burnt out and leaving the profession in droves. Improving their wellbeing is part of the solution to improving children’s education, argues the author of the best-selling memoir Teacher
‘Such great pay and all those holidays. Plus you only work from nine ’til three …’ is often the response a teacher receives when they say what they do for a living. It hurts, but we generally don’t defend ourselves. That’s partly because we’re aware of our reputation as being whingers and partly because we feel embarrassed – embarrassed for the person who said it and their gross ignorance. Teachers understand the public perception around the work they do, even if the public does not.
Watch the teacher who receives those words the next time you hear it said. You dumb-arse, they’re thinking. You have no idea what I do. Such great pay and all those holidays.
“So why don’t you do it?” is what teachers really want to say. Teaching sounds easy when it’s spoken about in terms of holidays and pay scales.
And when we look through the nostalgic lens of our own school experiences, teaching appears simpler still. We find ourselves assuming that because we went to school we know how to teach.
How hard can it be? is the subtext of so much public commentary around education.
The truth is that teaching is hard.
It is hard for the same reason it is exhilarating. Teaching is a strange kind of magic that requires you understand another’s thinking. It is the original, organic Bluetooth. Teachers connect their minds to those of their students, tuning in to understand what they understand, and then guiding them to deeper conceptual clarity.
Teaching means meeting students’ needs to foster the social and emotional conditions students require to learn. It is emotional work that demands compassion and patience.
Teaching is showing young people a world beyond themselves and a way of being in that world.
Teaching is like herding cats. It means bringing together disparate individuals and convincing them that acquiring an understanding of cells or Shakespeare or coding is a worthwhile enterprise. It’s messy too, like a kids’ party on steroids. It’s body odour and playground duty and lunchboxes and learning platforms. All of that and so much more. That’s teaching. The very bare bones of it.
Yet these days, it’s rare for a teacher to engage in the fundamentals of teaching. There’s no time anymore, and priorities have changed.
The teaching-learning loop – planning, delivery, assessment, feedback – has been hijacked by endless “reforms”. We now have an education system that looks like a Christmas tree decorated by an over-enthusiastic eightyear-old.
Education has been shaped into an industry, with the expectation that it is capable of performing according to a business model. As a result, the practice of teaching has become an endless series of tasks related to accountability: collect data, record data, report data.
Clearly, the pay and the “holidays” aren’t compelling enough. Teachers are leaving the profession.
Interestingly, in an “industry” obsessed with data, there is no national database on teacher attrition. Estimates vary but suggest that between one third and one half leave within the first five years. Teachers are also retiring early and leaving mid-career.
A recent NSW Teachers Federation survey revealed two thirds of teachers are reconsidering their future in the profession.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that those teachers who are practising are not thriving.
A majority of teachers, responding to any given research question or survey, identify as being depressed and/or having persistent anxiety.
Principals are recorded as experiencing extreme stress and are subject to more abuse and threats of violence, in various forms, than the general population.
When I first met Gwen it was 2015 and we were
teaching at the same school. Gwen was a graduate who was looking forward to making a difference.
I was falling apart; teaching kindergarten, taking antidepressants and seeing a psychologist. I was burning out in a spectacular way, like a handheld sparkler, my career’s end writ bright across a night sky.
Despite her enthusiasm, which seemed abrasive in the face of my decline, I liked Gwen.
She was older than a typical graduate, with a bachelor of applied arts, a major in glass-casting. And she’d worked for many years in high-end hospitality. She knew how to communicate, how to manage people – and she was creative.
Gwen had the makings of an outstanding teacher. By the end of her first year, Gwen was finding her feet. I had resigned.
Years later, Gwen is still in the trenches. She’s at a different school now, a public high school, in another state. She calls me, crying.
“How did you know that you wanted to quit?” she asks.
“I didn’t want to,” I say. “I had to.”
I remember the way my body had made the decision. I recall the panic attacks and the inertia that followed. I tell Gwen about the numbness, how I couldn’t laugh or cry.
“At least I’m crying,” she says. We giggle then and I am hoping with every part of my teacher heart that Gwen will be OK. Please, I pray, don’t let her be broken.
Gwen is an art teacher, fabulous and gifted – but she’s teaching out of subject. She’s got a full load of English: years 7, 8, 9 and 10. She’s also got year 8 drama and year 9 for a subject they’re calling digital.
“Any art?” I ask.
“Year 8.”
“No senior art?”
“Have to earn my stripes,” she says. “Or wait ’til someone retires.”
She sniffs and I know fresh tears are not far away. Teaching out of subject is common: a recent Teachers Federation survey showed eight out of 10 teachers have taught, or were currently teaching, outside their area of expertise.
Data from staff in Australian schools surveys shows out of subject teaching at 20 per cent in maths and 16 per cent in English.
“What’s happening for you?” I ask carefully. I’m no counsellor, just a recovering teacher who sometimes considers setting up the equivalent of an AA meeting for teachers like Gwen.
Thousands of teachers have contacted me since my memoir Teacher was published. My story has come to stand for many, helping teachers to feel seen and heard. It’s small comfort because the change we need is not forthcoming – and in the meantime, teachers are suffering.
“It’s just hard,” Gwen says. “I’m becoming a shit teacher.”
“I’m sure you’re not.”
“I am,” she says. “Two boys came in for digital and they were stoned.
“I didn’t do anything about it. They’re difficult kids and I felt …” she pauses.
“I felt grateful. It meant they’d sit quietly and I could get through the lesson.”
“Do you say anything?”
“I’d be reporting something every day. I’ll never get a job next year if I’m complaining all the time.”
Gwen’s contract is temporary. She reapplies for the position each year. This means “all those holidays” are partially unpaid and Gwen has no job security. This makes things such as mortgages and maternity leave problematic for teachers like Gwen. This casualisation is an unnecessary phenomenon that destabilises our schools, impacts student learning and devalues the profession.
TEACHING HAS BECOME AN ENDLESS SERIES OF TASKS RELATED TO ACCOUNTABILITY
“I spend most of the weekend marking,” Gwen goes on. “And doing online documenting for compliance. Most kids don’t read the feedback I give.”
She sighs. “Then when I assign grades, parents tear strips off me and insist that I give a better result, even though I spent hours marking against a criteria.”
Gwen tells me a story of a recent attempt to redirect a student who was using his phone during the lesson.
“I’ve got to finish this game,” he told her. “Calm the f--k down, Miss! I’m nearly at the next level.”
“I feel such shame at how they treat me.” Gwen breaks then.
It would be easy to make presumptions about Gwen’s experience. It’s probably a poor town, right? Low socio-economics. They’re probably kids with illiterate parents, the kind of people that have kids with several different partners. They had their first child at 16 and now they’re on the dole. They’re probably drug addicts. But this is not true.
Gwen’s school is in a regional area and there is some disadvantage, but not for the bulk of students. These are parents who, for the most part, work full time in agriculture, construction or tourism. They are tax-paying families with mortgages. Many own their own businesses and have completed year 12 and some have university degrees.
Perhaps then it’s school leadership that’s lacking? But Gwen can’t speak highly enough of her principal and the leadership team. “They’re all doing the best they can,” she assures me.
Gwen is living out the cumulative effects of an education system that has been buffeted by political winds and propelled by the neoliberal ideology that drives our society – every entitled man for himself.
Gwen’s experience speaks to that paradigm as it plays out in education: the casualisation of the profession, teaching out of subject, working at accountability tasks that achieve little, and being abused by students and parents who perceive themselves as customers.
I call Gwen to check in. She’s taken some sick
leave and seen her psychologist. She’s brought all her record-keeping up to date, just in case the shit ever hits the fan and she needs to stand up in court one day and give evidence about stoned students or assessment procedures. I ask her about the wellbeing measures that have been put in place at her school.
She laughs and cites a pre-recorded webinar all the teachers had to watch one afternoon after an exhausting day of remote teaching during lockdown.
“We had to email in a written response afterwards so they could tick and flick the wellbeing box.”
A pause and Gwen laughs again. “There’s also a wellbeing poster,” she says, her voice sounding mischievous. “It’s pinned up in the shared staff toilet.”
“The perfect place for wellbeing!”
“It says Take Five,” Gwen explains. “It says: Use your senses and become present.
“Then it says: What are five things you can see, touch, hear …”
“Smell!” We say it together and then both laugh like kookaburras.
“Does it also say taste?” I cannot help but ask. “Not sure,” Gwen says. “I’ll have a look tomorrow.’”
It won’t be enough for me to tell you that our
teachers need things to be better. That ubiquitous shorthand – such great pay and all those holidays – has created something of an archetype in the ways we let ourselves think about teachers and the work they must do.
And even though many people speak well of teachers – even though recent experiences of locked-down home learning provoked encouraging signs of renewed respect for the teaching profession – it still feels as though there’s little desire for the big transformational changes that are required for teachers to flourish and thrive. As a teacher, I know that a better angle is to appeal on behalf of the children, my students. Because everything I’ve described here impacts not only the teachers but their students as well.
What kind of teachers do we want for our children? Do we want teacher who are stressed and medicated? Do we want teachers teaching out of subject, exhausting themselves on casual contracts? Do we want to position teachers as ‘business operators’, forced to tolerate disrespect from students and parents because they are the ‘customers’? Do we want teachers who are sniffing the air of a shared toilet cubicle, trying to find a meditative moment?
Or do we want something better? Neoliberalism. Political interference. Call it what you will. There’s an obsession in education with measuring, making standard, collecting data. It does not serve any of us well – teachers, students, the societies to which they contribute. It has skewed the way we think about learning and it has eroded our trust in, and respect for, teachers.
The way we will know that our education system is flourishing and that our teachers and students are thriving within it, the way we might measure it, is when people’s first comment on meeting a teacher is to say: That’s important and challenging work.
Gabbie Stroud’s essay, Compulsory wellbeing: The choice between burnout and demoralisation, appears in Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves distributed by New South Books, out now griffithreview.com
Stroud’s memoir, Teacher: Allen & Unwin, was published in 2018.
It was short-listed for Biography of the Year at the ABIA Awards in 2019