4 ms·
The same problem is happening in NL, it's a downwards spiral really that concerns me a lot. The government is trying to improve the situation by increasing pay
by synthc 4y ago
The same problem is happening in NL, it's a downwards spiral really that concerns me a lot.
The government is trying to improve the situation by increasing pay a little, but with the current inflation it is probably too little, too late.
A relative of mine became a teacher after a career switch, and while she likes the work, there are many frustrations:
- Parents have a 'the customer is always right'-attitude, and complain about everything, but their kids are perfect of course.
- Some years ago NL decided to cut down on schools for kids with special needs, so every class now has a few very disruptive kids who have nowhere else to go. This is a very frustrating situation for everyone: the disruptive kids don't get proper guidance, the 'normal' kids get lower quality classes, and teachers have to deal with problematic behaviour.
- The shortage of teachers makes it hard to find replacements when calling in sick, plenty of teachers feel pressure to work when sick. This is of course a bad combo with the whole Corona situation.
- Teachers spend a lot of (unpaid) time grading and other administrative BS.
- Management is out of touch, they don't listen to their staff and think up time-consuming plans that are doomed to fail. (well, this is not specific to education)
- Management is very unstable. The schools my kids go to had a different director pretty much each year.
- Beltalowda 4y agoThis is compounded by making it quite hard to actually get in to teaching, especially later in life. You have to go to school for 4 years and pay for this yourself (no student financing), which essentially no one does for obvious reasons. There is a special path for adults (zij-instroomtraject) which means you "only" get paid minimum wage for two years and the entry requirements (IMHO needlessly) excludes quite a few people. Inflexibility in how we treat education in general is a big problem; I was sent to MAVO back in the day only because I hated doing French and was pretty awful at it, and bad French grade of course means you can't possibly be good at anything else :-/ There were quite a few people in my MAVO class like that. There's been shortages of technically educated people for decades, which is not a surprise if you judge technical people on their ability to do French when they're 13 and then close off all avenues for further education based on that... Or, as one of my foreign friends said, "you need a diploma to clean a rat's arse here".
- rr808 4y agoI always respected Dutch teachers as they did the core work and didn't do extra work like after school sports or clubs. Is that correct? I feel US teachers are expected to do too much non-teaching work.
- synthc 4y agoThey don't do sport or clubs, but still spend plenty of time on grading and preparation.