One of my siblings is going to school once a week, I think lockdowns definitely fried some brains.
It’s a really hard and stressful job and you get paid really badly for it. I haven’t watched the video and maybe it’s just a clickbait title, but the generational framing here seems unhelpful and misleading. Teaching has had a very high percentage of people leaving the profession for a number of years now. The reason is that teachers are underpaid, overworked and honestly underappreciated. This has only gotten worse and worse as neoliberal reforms have restructured both the profession and society. That might create the appearance of ‘teachers can’t stand the new kinds of young people we have now’, but that isn’t the underlying reason for people leaving the profession
I often try to reframe the same thinking when my mother complaints about her students. It is true that for the last 2-3 years though that the kids had an especially bad behavioral track, but with the new class the consensus seems to be more that they’re better behaved in a general sense. I also try to point out that her generational framing is inaccurate since they’re literally children and children of any generation can be absolutely awful. I also try to point out that in general most of the families that “aren’t involved” likely aren’t lazy, but instead overwhelmed with keeping above water that enforcing education becomes a lot more difficult.
Then there’s the job itself, she’s usually putting in 10 hours a day at school, brings home work some times, they don’t get the planning periods they need, shortstaffing sometimes requires them to cover other teachers’ classes, the special education department was gutted with them mainlining all but the most disabled of those students, they’re constantly making changes in processes that really have no need beyond some administrator looking like they’re doing something which leads to things needing complete reworks, when administration comes around they’ll either spout out empty platitudes or just mostly ignore anything of import, administration will tear teachers down for not being a textbook teacher, and it goes on and on with stuff I don’t see coming home. For all of this, my mother hasn’t gotten a raise in like a decade now, she’s at the top of the pay scale and at best she gets cost of living increases that maybe amount to a few hundred a year. I make more than her at the bottom of most nursing pay scales. When I first started at the hospital I made 28/hr, I make 40/hr outside of the hospital and make more than my mother that works more than I do because she’s salaried. She also has way more qualifications than I do, I have a 2 year degree, she’s Masters+.
All this is to say that in a similar fashion, I saw the video, thought the framing was reductive, and didn’t click. Maybe they explain it better, but the generational framing when there’s so much more to it, even if just clickbait, means that they’re not properly looking at the underlying problems.
Completely! The demands made on teachers are completely untenable. My ex worked in a primary school and they would go to work at 7am, get home at 8pm, and then work the whole of Sunday doing marking/prep. They ended up leaving the profession because the stress made it physically impossible for them to continue. Most public sector workers are compensated appallingly, especially when you consider how important the work they do is. It’s such a waste of resources to spend all this money and time training people for a profession only to place them in conditions where 50% burn out within 5 years. The Graeber argument about the inverse relationship between the usefulness of labour and its compensation feels so accurate
