$3.27 a child an hour
September 28, 2007 by warrick
Amusing, but sad article in today’s AGE from David Campbell which patiently unravels just what we are paying our best teachers in terms of per student per hour. The answer? About $3.27 if you DON’T count weekend work, holiday work, lunchtime work and the rest of the reality of the job. Forget performance pay; how about just decent pay? The article is worth reading, even if it’s just to put a resigned smile on your face and make you put away the correction today and enjoy a holiday without school related work.
Campbell concludes:
Yet each parent expects that his or her child will receive
sufficient individual attention from the teacher to overcome any
problems and produce a well-rounded, socially adept and
academically successful student. All for $3.27 an hour.“Oh, rubbish!” you might argue. “You can’t reduce it to that.
Teaching is a vocation, and you can’t just break it down into
hourly rates. It’s one of the caring professions. Teachers work for
the love of the job, because of the intangible rewards they get
from seeing children develop and succeed.”True. But, over the past three decades, teachers have watched
their salaries drop markedly in comparison with average weekly
earnings. At the same time, the job of teaching has become
immensely more complex and difficult as it is subjected to the
pressures of an increasingly fractured society and unrealistic
parental and government expectations.And respect for the
profession has declined.No wonder we’re confronted with a crippling shortage of
teachers.
The full article is HERE
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wow! and you are from Australia… And I thought those sad unrealistic expectations of parents and government, who somehow expect us teachers to give individual attention to every one of thirty to forty kids AT THE SAME TIME as if we are the personal tutor in thirty or forty bodies, only exists in Singapore!!
Plus the ridiculous notion that came down from the top of the hierarchy that parents are our “number one customers” and we need to provide utmost customer service to pander to their every whim.
It is ridiculous. Teachers should not be compared to customer service providers wiping the feet of parents — they and their children will soon see themselves as emperors.
Like one of my colleagues says, “the children have higher status than us in the schools. Parents are Number One, the children are Number Two (they are our kings and we are only their slaves).”
This warped thinking is happily promoted by those sitting in ivory towers in Ministry of Education who have not known the realities of teaching in actual schools in this time and age.
Pupils soon learn to take advantage of it and can ‘threaten’ to ‘report’ teachers.
Teachers are afraid to discipline pupils — because teachers are not treated as authority figures by the government but as “customer service servants” to ingratiate ourselves with unreasonable parents.
When it’s one person’s word against another’s, my school in Singapore takes the parent’s word or the child’s word as the Truth versus the poor teacher’s words.
Thanks for that perspective. It’s really interesting to hear how other systems are coping (or not) with change. I agree with you about the ‘customer’ notion; it’s not one I’ve ever been entirely comfortable with.