Teachers departing profession due to increasingly Pythonesque admin

In “Teachers should be paid extra, work less” by Natasha Bita (23-24/7), reasons are given for the chronic nationwide shortage of teachers and the increasing number of those who leave the profession. The workload is given as one reason, along with high rents in some areas.

As a semi-retired teacher who began her career in 1980, I have seen the workload increase largely through the Pythonesque number of administrative duties teachers are expected to do almost every day, which include documenting every misdemeanour a child commits; providing parents and caregivers with regular updates on course content and their child’s progress via email; as well as on centralised software; and being required to communicate through emails with other colleagues rather than the faster and more efficient face-to-face method. Preparing lessons and marking students’ work is part of a teacher’s job; mindless, ever-increasing administration shouldn’t be.

Another issue is the content and assessment methods, which are altered at an alarming rate, making for time-consuming professional development and usually resulting in no or little improvement in student outcomes. Often terminology is all that is altered, so that it sounds more obscure and therefore is supposed to deliver a higher standard while the basics of literacy and numeracy are neglected. Students in English are expected to discuss “voice” in texts but often can’t put a sentence together. This is change driven by ambitious educrats in gilded palaces, thinking up more and more irrelevant, time-wasting, woke-friendly strategies and content on a league table of brownie points.

Attitudes to education have changed. It is now necessary to make learning “fun”, ignoring the need for the repetition and drill (not such fun) needed to acquire the basic skills for lifelong learning, which include the times table and spelling rules.

Young minds are addled by technology, resulting in short attention spans and an expectation to be constantly stimulated. Is learning to occur by osmosis rather than sustained application?

Teachers are increasingly faced with bored, restless and therefore difficult-to-manage students. The issues of administrivia, change for change’s sake, and a need to detox students from screen time must be addressed to stem the rate at which the profession is being abandoned.

Ingrid Tolman, Esperance, WA

Given school teachers get nine weeks of extra paid holidays a year, how many hours would they have to work in each of their 39 working weeks before being deemed to be working above standard annual working hours? For the non-maths teachers among you, it works out at about 46 hours a week.

Teachers are also actually paid very well, considering their overall shorter-than-average hours, short years of study and the low university entrance score required. The highest levels of teacher pay far surpass what I earn as a senior-ish public servant with 30 years’ experience, one undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees, and with a working week that often exceeds my paid 37.5 hours.

Many of my teacher friends tell me the real problem is the endless “tick a box” activities they are required to complete; all apparently designed to demonstrate effective teaching practice but which, ironically, appear to be the main reason their teaching practice is becoming increasingly less effective and less enjoyable.

Maggie Woodhead, Swan View, WA

Caring, not caving

I take issue with Dennis Shanahan’s interpretation of showing compassion and justice to casual workers as a “low point of caving in under pressure” by the government (“Gearing up for a world of trouble”, 23-24/7). Sometimes it is the right and courageous thing to do for a government to change its mind. Rather than “caving in”, in this case it was a belated recognition that casual workers should be paid for work days missed because of Covid-19. The consequences of not doing so could have had an economic as well as a health cost, for infected workers who can’t afford to take leave sometimes disobey health advice and attend workplaces.

Lorraine Chester, Burleigh Heads, Qld

Churchill’s legacy

I’m noticing an increase in the noise from those who wish to cancel Winston Churchill. But as is so perfectly expressed by Graham Freudenberg in his essay in Penelope Hanley’s book, Inspiring Australians, The First Fifty Years of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the significance of Churchill’s achievement is renewed with every change in human perspective, and every new setting of the human condition. Freudenberg writes: “And this is mainly because he was so gloriously right on the One Big Thing when it counted most, at a supreme crisis for civilisation.”

Paul Tys, Noosa Heads, Qld