Teachers, Bankers, and Job Security

AnonoBoy wrote: »

I'm outraged at the outrage but also outraged at the lack of outrage (depending on how I'm having pints with).

There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country now who are extremely exposed to food poverty, children of unemployed people as a consequence are through pure circumstance, who now find themselves exposed to the kind of lifestyles and struggle that belongs back in the inner city tenements of 1901.

Gardai, teachers and other PS workers who are trying to hide under this mantle of abject poverty in an effort to obtain public sympathy and in an attempt to protect and preserve their very generous entitlements and their working practices that belong back in the Victorian times, when the reality is that they are completely and fully protected from any of the hardship that other people are struggling with daily, in my opinion they are absolute disgrace on themselves.

chocbisc wrote: »

i'm amazed that freddie 59 hellfireboy and westendgirlie haven't considered teaching as a career seeing how handy teachers have it.

You see that's the difference between you and I.

I know I wouldn't be into teaching so I wouldn't put the academic and intellectual needs of a child, ahead of my own selfish need for a salary.

The vast vast majority of the teachers that I had in my school years, didn't give a fiddlers about anything other than the fact that they had landed a handy number with no measurable responsibilities, which gave loads of time off and paid very well...

el tonto wrote: »

Are you reading that properly? Because it says they have to cover the absences of the teachers who are taking students out?

Yes but it also says that a "freed up" teacher, freed up because his/her class that he/she is paid hansomly to teach, is not on the school site due to some event or visit somewhere, DOES NOT have to supervise (as distinct from teach), another class that might require supervison, due to a teacher absence, but where that absence is not caused by a teachers having taken students off site...

I find this kind of qualification to be quite incredible, considering that it is still in place after what is cited as an agreement to bring about improved efficiencies has been accepted by teachers.

What this means is that if a teacher is idle, or "freed up", due to his/her class being off site, then that teacher only has to provide supervision, if it is required by reason of one of the other teachers classes (another teacher who is off site), needing cover.

For any other absence of a teacher, not associated with this off site day or event, an idle teacher at work, has been instructed to stay idle, rather than get with the team effort and supervise a class that someone else will have to be paid to do or else a class sent home...

In a private sector environment, this is what is known as a "PETTY RULE"...

delta_bravo wrote: »

There is no easy way to quantify (or cheap way) a teachers ability. I would love to be assessed and have an incentive scale.

This year I have pupils who will do well to scrape a D in a Junior Cert O.L. exam due to them being constantly absent,suspended or simply not caring. They will most likely drop out after that. If they fail is that my fault? I put the hours in correct copies, making lessons interactive and visual as most have literacy difficulties. I spend far more time planning lessons than teaching them. Most of it has little effect. Should I get the boot or docked pay?

I'm hearing some of what you are saying, but I personally recall p*ss poor teaching standards in my school years, along some very simple lines, particularly in the area of maths, a lack of ability on the part of some teachers to teach fundamental mathematical concepts. I'm blessed that I had the opportunity to have these addressed very early in 3rd level, and the problem all along was that the imparting of the basic fundamentals of mathematical concepts hadn't been done properly.

The weirdest thing was that when I landed into 3rd level, our maths lecturer couldn't believe that he was landed with a whole class of mainly young lads who couldn't add properly in terms of what to do with variables, etc, even though we had all come from different schools all around the country! The poor lecturer spent weeks working with lads like myself, going back over the Leaving Cert Ordinary Level curriculum!

There is no excuse for this, for finding yourself lecturing a room full of lads in 1st year of university and finding that they are struggling with the absolute basic competencies in maths...

I don't completely blame the sh*t teacher that I had, but I blame whatever over arching union or department allowed a situation to arise where I wasn't taught maths properly for years and there was no system to detect this or to remedy it, when it was the same very system itself which had failed to get basic concepts across to me...

Maybe it's not the teachers responsibity to "manage" the system so that money goes in at one end and results come out at the other, but it ought to be someone's responsibility, and whoever is responsible, they should make the decisions that are necessary to fix a problem, such as the one I've previously identified on thread, which is that 20% of students sitting the LC are failing to demonstrate a basic competency in maths, and whoever is responsible for fixing this serious problem, they should be free to make the decisions and others involved in the process, such as teachers, should cooperate with it and get fully behind it, instead of working out ways, through collective behaviours with unions, to frustrate change and say no all the time...

Having said that, I believe teachers who are in the right job and have a vocation in teaching should be highly renumerated and basically spoilt rotten by the state, because they are a hugely valuable state resource.

But equally, the ones who have identified it as the handy number that it currently is and who are happy to lodge themselves in the job for their careers and mess up the chances of the next generation through their incompetence, they should be rooted out of the teaching industry.

I'm not saying that teachers should be sacked summarily, what I'm saying is that where there is a trend of poor results year after year, some kind of a task force needs to go in and identify what the problem is and put a plan in place to fix the problem and the teacher should have no option but to cooperate with it. The whole thing should be based on improving the results gradually every year, using technology, new teaching techniques, etc...

But all I've been listening to for the last 30 years is, "we withold cooperation on absolutely everything, until we see what the shape and size of the next pay agreement will be"... That's no way to improve standards, and while we have a chance to sort all of our issues out in this country now, I think we should take it and stop tolerating money going in but f*ck all coming out at the other end.