Whenever two or more teachers are gathered, there will no doubt be a venting session. It is just something that happens. Sure, at first, it starts with a lot of pent-up energy that needs a form of release, but over time, it turns into some form of building one another up and sharing good ideas. This can be a beautiful moment because only a teacher will get it.
Recently (well, actually always, but …) I had such an encounter. The vent was about how frustrating it is that we are meant to live with and deal with these crazy amounts of contradictions in our education ecosystem. Starting with incidences in our classrooms (sometimes other people’s classrooms when they’re absent) and the school at large to greater systemic issues provincially and nationwide. It is a feeling of “we all know it and speak of it as true, but the actions of the people in charge contradict the situation.”
I used to see social media posts about teachers sending truly and WILDLY troublesome kids to the principal’s office only for them to come back with a simile on their faces sucking on a lollipop. Most of the teachergrams that I follow are American, so I thought, “That only happens there.” Lo and behold, the number of times that my colleagues and I have experienced equivalent scenarios. A kid throwing a desk in a classroom, nothing happened. I went through the trauma of having to see and teach the child as though nothing had happened. The suspension probably lasted two days with zero real consequences. A kid makes disgusting sexual comments about a school staff member, admits to it with no remorse. Punished with a written warning and gets to laugh away his consequences with his friends (literally). A kid threatened to hit a teacher with a chair behind their back and lied through their teeth about doing “nothing.” An in-school suspension, which basically means, come to school every day, check with your teachers if you have a test or outstanding work, if you get it all done, you get to go home early. A kid found by a teacher to be vaping and lies about it. However, because it did not belong to them and they are not normally troublesome, let’s let this one slide. There are too many more incidents to mention…
The point is, we all know these things were wrong and needed to be addressed in more stringent ways than what actually happened. We spoke of it as true that some of these kids should not be in our school because all they did was cause havoc over and over again. For some reason, they got a heck of a lot of undue leniency, more and more lollipops, the kind that colours your mouth and tongue and all you want to do is show it off in smiles and laughter. That’s just at the classroom and school level when it comes to contradictions …
On a much grander scale, something else we know is that our classrooms are overcrowded, we need either more schools or schools need more classrooms. We need more teachers being trained and hired because we know that by 2030, close to 50% will retire. So many decisions, new bills, and policies directly affect the daily lives of teachers and, usually, in a negative way with zero protection or additional compensation. The greatest contradiction by “upper management” is to keep doing the opposite of what we know to be the truth. Cut down the education budget, decrease the number of available teaching posts/jobs (or just not renew contracts), increase the number of kids in a school without increasing the physical space and resources needed, and somehow teachers must implement without ever being consulted.
Crazy business! But somehow, we are surviving, even though we would prefer to be thriving more. Maybe one day we will, or it will all burn, and everyone would still wonder, “What happened?” Hopefully, instead of a blame game, the response would be, “Let’s ask teachers for help.” I am not hexing the entire education system. There is some good that has come from it. It isn’t a bad thing to want more good, excellent even! That’s normally how teacher conversations go. 😅
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