A DAD'S LIFE:My dreams of a classroom career left me in a cold sweat, writes ADAM BROPHY
ONCE UPON a time I considered being a teacher. Not when I finished college, as at that stage the memory of how depressed my own secondary teachers always seemed, except on the final day of term, was still too fresh. No, it crossed my mind immediately after the elder was born, when I had jacked in my job to look after her, when the bills were landing on the mat with heavyweight thuds and there was nothing in the penny jar to quell their red-inked screams.
The motivation was obvious. Here is a career that follows directly from a third-level arts education, pays well (all right, before teachers start howling at the injustices they have suffered in comparison to the public sector over the years, it pays a lot better than many of the jobs I worked) and, most of all, provides the kind of holidays the rest of the population lusts after.
My thinking at the time was straightforward: go back to college for a year, get my Dip and dig us out of the financial hole we found ourselves in through choosing to be available to our baby. And manage that in a career that meant you could work full-time and still be there for the kids as they grew up.
I bet a lot of people choose teaching, many in mid-life and some (those with a Machiavellian twist) when they’re launching for the first time into employment, for those very reasons. I bet they’re the teachers who hate their jobs. The ones who start the countdown to Halloween on September 1st and spend the winter months staring at a postcard of the south of France, dreaming of their planned biking holidays through the Pyrenees. I don’t have to bet, I know these people. They’re usually very nice, but should be doing something different for funds.
As I sat down to fill out the teacher training application form I had a glimpse of my future self in a future September, sweating. The form remained unfilled.
Instead, I began a freelance career focused often times on editing schoolbooks, through which I have had the privilege of meeting some of the most talented people in the country. Teachers who, if they had chosen to enter banking would probably be fabulously wealthy and possibly not have the country teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Teachers in possession of deep wells of knowledge, who not only understand how best to work the tortured examination system, but also have a talent for imparting knowledge to others, and a need to do so. Teachers who teach, rather than spend eight months of the year locked in a room with 30 children. Teachers who write books because they know they can produce better than the material they are already using, who provide grinds to weak students, tools to average students, and a little bit of inspiration to the best ones.
But for every teacher in the country, good and bad, this time of year is sweeter than honey.
The holidays lie stretched out, a broad sun-kissed meadow, the only dark spot being the mountains of September on the horizon.
I thought of the plight of teachers as we stood watching which ones our kids would be paired with for the coming academic year. We, a loose gaggle of parents, hovering around the front gates with our mental notebooks in hand, the kids lined up, awaiting their fates, before being marched into the rooms where they would spend 2010/11. A chatter goes around: “Oh, she’s very good, strong on discipline and they always wind up loving her”, “That múinteoir’s so gentle, great with the smallies”, “He’s gas, gets them learning through tricks and jokes”.
It was this unofficial “parental appraisal” that struck me. Whether they like what they’re doing or not, teachers have to get through their working day. Unlike the rest of us however, they are accountable not only to their bosses, but also to us, the parents. A rose-tinted glass-wearing motley crew who expect their precious offspring to be educated, motivated, entertained, socialised and disciplined by that poor soul who faces down our brats and their mates, day in and out.
For coping with what we have produced and, for the most part, not damaging them too badly when the temptation to destroy must be enormous, I salute the teacher. You deserve your ridiculous holidays. You deserve them because, to paraphrase Captain Kirk, you boldly go where most of us fear to tread.
abrophy@irishtimes.com