Saw a teacher friend of mine on Saturday at the pub. She’s not Catholic but works at a Catholic school. She wove us all a tale of one lunch time on yard duty when a kid came up to her crying and pointing.
“That boy called me a fat head,” the kid wailed.
So my friend walked up to the other boy, who was quite a bit older and tougher, and asked him why he’d called the first kid a fat head.
“I didn’t call him a fat head, Miss!” he cried indignantly. “I called him a fag-gett.”
Back in 2002 when I was deciding whether to quit my relatively young (but well paid and fast-advancing) career as a television director and retrain as a primary school teacher I made a list that looked something like this:
FOR
* Start at 9am, finish at 3:30pm.
* Tonnes of holidays.
* Autonomy in workplace.
* Worksheets to keep kids busy while surfing net.
* Gender imbalance in teaching workforce means lots of chicks to perve at.
* Really relaxed dress code.
* Chance to brainwash students with leftist ideology.
AGAINST
* Shit pay.
* Four poverty-stricken years at uni.
* Have to work with children.
* Actual responsibility.
It’s two days into term one of my second year in the classroom and I’ve had another 8am to 6pm day with no lunch break to speak of and work I had to bring home. I’d like to add one more item to the AGAINST list:
* Absolutely, totally, fucking exhausting.
grodscorp@grods.com
GrodsThink Ep.31 (16/9/08)
