So hands up if you reckon teachers deserve better wages, conditions, well, everything really. Photo: File.
One of those studies came out this week. You know the sort of thing … after they spend a million or two organising it, distributing it and then analysing it, it comes back with revelations such as – people with little money get less of an education than rich folk.
Such surveys cost a bomb to put together and tell you little more than you knew before. But at least this week’s one had class – even though it was hardly without its bleeding obvious-ness: Teachers need more support.
Seriously? All that money to uncover that? Someone should teach those survey-makers a thing or two about, well, making surveys that you have to chalk up to more than the bleeding obvious.
Teachers should be treated like the treasures they are. They should be paid obscene, or at least much better, sums of money, given more time to do the prep work they have to do in order to do their job and get even more money/benefits/holidays in Fiji just because they do the job they do. Teach our kids.
Yes, parents raise them until nappy becomes a dirty, smelly word, but what happens after that when the kids start to act like baby humans? They’re lobbed off somewhere else for others to educate.
Sure, like everything, there’s some bad ones in the bunch. Like my kindergarten teacher, for example, Miss Thistlewaite.
She was about 150 by the time she started with my class and spent her days whacking my left hand every time I picked up my pencil/anything else with it. Left-handers in the Stone Age were about as undertood as that other prehistoric material, fibreglass.
She was also clearly the vindictive type. Giving herself a name like that when her pupils, only a few of us with front teeth, couldn’t even lisp her name let alone pronounce it with any clarity.
Speed on to primary school when this huge bloke, whose name I have wiped from my memory for fear of me remembering it, and him, again, used to grease his hair so much you wondered why it didn’t slip off. He was also an “artiste”, painting things that he left around his classroom just in case a rich parent had a bare wall and little taste.
But there were so many good ones. Women, mainly, who, again back in the Stone Age, had to fight on a number of fronts to prove they were as good as the blokes. Women who taught us how to stand up for ourselves, to use our brains for good not evil and even why there was a reason for logarithms. Never quite mastered all of them – especially the latter – but had fun trying to figure them out. Literally.
Might be good to remember a teacher’s worth when it comes to thank-you gift time.
They might already have a couple of hundred Best Teacher in the World mugs, so why not opt for something they might really appreciate even if it’s only a sweet dream? A spontaneous thank you, a day off – or a teacher/parent interview with their choice of George Clooney or Margot Robbie. Or both. Yes, he has kids and apparently she’s just about to.
Classy stuff.
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