Is Teaching Really Worth It?

(from a S'pore teacher's blog)

The following comments in no way represent my point of view. For now lah.

1) I hate waking up at the crack of dawn.


2) I hate collecting money from students. I hate having to count money collected from 40 students. I hate having to bring change of money to class. I hate it that 70% of my time with students involves collecting money from them. I hate it when people ask me why I can’t ask the admin staff which MOE has provided to every school to help with such mundane tasks. I hate explaining for the zillionth time that the admin staff in my school (and possibly in many schools) do not help teachers to collect money from students. They help the principal and vice-principal with their admin work, not teachers. Are we clear about that now?

Oh money is a pain, especially when 1/2 your students cannot afford the $70 the school wants. Then there is the $200 withdrawal from edusave. I have to collect the forms, then haunt the students when it turns out they don’t have that amount in their edusave accounts. If they can’t pay $70, what makes you think they can come out with $200 in cash? And the admin staff? Well, the only help I get is constant reminders that my students have not paid up.


3) I hate having to queue up at the copier to zap notes and worksheets for my students. I hate it that about 80+ teachers have to share two copier machines. So the queue is long, and a lot of negotiation goes on at the copier everyday as we decide who should let whom go first, who needs the notes more urgently, and who can clear the paper jam at the machine. I hate it that no one has invented a machine which can handle the copying load in a typical Singapore school so that it won’t break down every 3 days.


4) I hate it when, after beating ferocious colleagues at the copier and finally being able to zap the notes which I have painstakingly prepared for my students, I find them lying on the floor in the classroom later, with shoe prints on them. I hate it when I realise, once again, that teaching is often a thankless job.


5) I hate it when people think Teach Less Learn More means I have more free time. I hate explaining that there’s no such thing called Content Reduction. Tell me which school has experienced Content Reduction and I’ll transfer there. Our syllabus has not been cut, OK? We just move topics around. Hence we really don’t know how to teach less. Period.


6) I hate teaching National Education because I don’t know how to do it without sounding like Mao Zedong. And my students hate it when I so much as mention words like “history of Singapore” or “loyalty”. I think National Education is important but I don’t want to to teach it in such a direct way because my students tell me I’m brainwashing them and I hate to be a brainwasher.

Not to mention Sex education and moral education which the students regard as big jokes.


7)I hate having to keep a red pen in every one of my handbags, because I am constantly having to mark something. I hate bringing scripts with me everywhere I go. I hate it that my marking is never finished, even on the last day of the school year, because there just isn’t enough time for teachers to mark their students’ work, and because we have to do so many other non-teaching-related work. And I hate it when people ask me if my marking is done! I am never going to say yes. There are two types of marking - urgent ones (like exam papers and other important work) and non-urgent ones. Guess which gets pushed away when there are events to plan, carry out and other admin nonsense to do? Guess who suffers in the end?


8) New initiatives like bluesky, white space, TLLM, I&E, SEL, SL. All within a space of 3 years?! What do they think we teachers are? And everytime they introduce something, we have to go for workshops and training to learn about it. Then we are expected to go back to school and put it into practice immediately.


9) I hate it when during my work appraisal, my boss reminds me that teaching is my bread and butter and that I have to do it well, and then merrily gives me ten non-teaching projects to do. Why can’t I just concentrate on my bread and butter?

Yes and they imply that even though I carried out all the non-teaching projects, I am not doing enough for my form class because I do not call their parents enough. Well you try organising community work for the whole school on your own, running a CCA with no money to hire an instructor, organising inter-class competitions, holding enrichment camps and putting together public performances and finding the time to chat with 40 parents on a regular basis. And those are just the official things I do.


10) Rankings. I understand the need to be assessed. I understand the need to maybe give us a grade at the end of the year. But why the mixed messages? A - C grades mean vary levels of exceeding expectations. D grade, apparently, means meeting expectations. Yet, if you get a D grade, you do not get a performance bonus. Fair enough after all you are just meeting expectations. But if you get a D grade 3 times in a row, you need to be reassessed by ministry officials because it is not enough to meet expectations. Then you might get put on probation. This ranking is so stressful that I know of teachers who do not want to be promoted because after a certain level, you are expected to carry out initiatives that has impact on the cluster level (i.e.: impact about 13 schools) and really, how many teachers have the time or energy to do that on top of their normal workload? Oh and did I mention that you don’t actually get to know your grading (unless of course you are a D-grader)? The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy.