Teachers are not the enemy. So stop treating them like one

Parents have dropped the ball and our teachers have had to pick it up. Even for deliberate, functional parents, teachers are saviours, backups. They should be lauded, not loathed.

Who knows the answer to my question?

Schools go back next week after the long summer break.

But today, the teachers are already back at it, getting lessons ready for our children, preparing learning spaces and bracing themselves to take charge of our young people. Young people who have had at least six weeks without set bedtimes, far too much screen time and rubbish holiday food, and have been generally indulged by their parents.

A teacher’s job is not easy and it’s getting harder.

This week it was revealed that a third of schools are being led by acting principals; another report showed bullying is rife in the public service.

Teachers are battling — and are now collectively one of the most reviled professional groups. The hate spewed online is hair-curling.

And those high workload, low-pay, time-poor burdens are exacerbated by the inevitable parental grumbling that will shortly start. The parents might not be happy with their child’s assigned teacher, without ever having met them. They probably have hip-pocket pain after getting uniforms and books sorted so soon after Christmas. They hand over already tired children who don’t like being bossed around at school.

And the parents whinge about teachers, not their children. The combative nature of it has become a bizarre ritual dance.

I give it until two weeks from tomorrow, the day of the annual Day Eight Collection, for the grating, whining parental engines to really get cranked up.

On that day, a statistical snapshot is taken of students enrolled at schools and the department decides how many teachers and teacher aides each school needs for the year. Some are given and some taken away.

How ridiculous is that? Get the kiddies settled, then shake some of them up and change them around: it is an archaic, persistent, unsettling practice.

But this annual action is the trigger for parents’ discontent finding a real and virtual voice. Everything has changed in the generation between being a kid and raising one. The finger of blame has taken a dramatic turn.

This year, how about we change the pattern, because parents need teachers more than ever. This year, how about we lay off them and aim for positivity towards teachers instead?

After all, these days teachers are raising many of our kids. They are our allies.

Parents have dropped the ball and our teachers have had to pick it up. Even for deliberate, functional parents, teachers are saviours, backups. They should be lauded, not loathed.

Other than parents, teachers are the most significant adults in every child’s life. For many children, teachers offer the firm hand and responsible guidance their parents fail to give them.

They teach our children that “please” and “thank you” still matter. They teach them that not all adults are called by their first names.

They teach our kids to read, and introduce some kids to their first book. With the introduction of Prep, some early childhood teachers are even nailing down our kids’ toilet training.

They teach them that, sometimes, direction must simply be followed without justification or explanation. Children must do things sometimes simply because an adult tells them to. It is a revelation to too many.

Teachers today guide many children through their only tastes of history, brushes with arts and culture and explanations of economics and politics.

These days, it is the teachers who notice when a child has a hearing issue, a speech deficit, a learning difficulty. (Parents apparently don’t even notice when their own child is fat, with a Curtin University report published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health in November revealing it is often teachers who notice when a child is overweight.)

This means parents largely don’t read to, listen to or truly look at their children any more.

Without teachers looking out for them, the current crop of schoolkids would really come a cropper.

And when I was a child, if I got in trouble at school, it meant I was also in trouble at home. Now if a child gets in trouble at school, the parents march straight up to the school to defend their little poppet. Never mind if poppet was in the wrong, or stuffed up or — heaven forbid — failed at something.

Because we have a generation of children who have not been allowed to fall and pick themselves up, we have a generation of children who lack resilience, who do not learn that failure is rarely final.

So this school year, instead of repeating the corrosive conflict pattern that clearly is in no child’s best interest, let us start by seeing teachers as being on the same team as parents.

Goodness knows, now more than ever, it takes a whole, positive village to raise a hopefully reasonably functional child.

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Originally published as Teachers are not the enemy. So stop treating them like one