calling all teachers..

xirokx

xirokx

xirokx

Soldato
Joined
2 Oct 2004
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N.W London
Hey there,

My partner wants to become an I.T. teacher so first is planning on doing an access to I.T. course then another I.T. course at uni so she can teach secondary school students in the U.K. or abroad..

I therefore wanted to find out from current teachers how stressful their job is? in particuar if they teach I.T.

Would you recommend it? All jobs I appreciate have up's and downs so just wanted to recieve an opinion from a teacher..

All thoughts and advise would be appreciated...

thanks..
 
I would not like to teach teenagers who do not want to learn. I work for an Education IT company providing an MLE and generally the teachers I speak with are fairly stressed and do not know how to do thier jobs.
 
she accepts the fact its low paid and wants to do it for those pupils who actually want to learn - the 1% of them...

what stresses are teachers faced with? forgive my ignorance but would be interested to understand and am only asking because I really dont know....

its a 9pm - 4pm, sometimes having to work late, sure you get bad pupils like you get bad bosses but for the ones you want to learn and are interested in learning surely its rewarding?

she is a real peoples person and gains a lot of satisifaction from helping others..
 
The work out of hours is a big part of the job.

Lesson plans, homework/marking etc do actually take a lot of time.

My Sister and Brother in law are teachers, the one year PGCE course they both did was absolute hell. They are both finding it extremely difficult to find any real teaching jobs after being out of uni for 2 years.

:edit: This is primary school, I expect the stress/out of hours work is even more intense for secondary level.
 
PGCE is hard? can I ask what they are finding difficult? infact why they are finding it hell?

could the fact the are finding it hard to find teaching jobs is because of the credit crunch and what they teach?

cheers!!!
 
my sisters husband is an IT Teacher and he tells me everyday to switch. Finnished by 3:30pm and because he teachs mainly A-Levels he has bugger all marking or planning to do.

My sister is a Foriegn languages teacher, she likes it but has to do a lot more marking and planning as she has just started she mainly gets yrs 7/8/9.

EDIT- Be prepared to lose your wife, all teachers seem to get with others!
 
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I don't know the situation in England, but in Scotland there are very few primary teaching positions as teachers tend to stay in one position until they retire.
 
8am until 4pm.

Getting home, marking, preparing lessons, writting reports, lesson plans, going on "pointless courses", meetings, performance meetings.

Dealing with other people's problems all day, dealing with hard to handle kids, helping kids with their problems, helping other teachers with their problems, dealing with ***** of a senior management, getting shouted at, getting abuse, making sure kids arrive and leave safely, watching them at break time, not eating properly, fights, upset kids, kids with learning difficulties, parents, angry parents, parents evenings....

Seeing kids mature, and grow into little adults, and knowing you helped them get there :)
Worth all the **** ?
 
If you are in a really nice school, and are a few years into the job so you have loads of planning work under your belt, then it's fine.
I'm near the end of my pgce couse (secondary science), and I can tell you I'm not looking forward to a full timetable at a normal school any time soon, I only have 60% at the moment and i'm working until 7 every night and all of sunday!

IT, however, shouldn't be as bad as science, as there is a much narrower range of content, and there will be repeated classes each week (same lesson to more than one group) - that's something science teachers never get!
 
thanks peeps

8am until 4pm.

Getting home, marking, preparing lessons, writting reports, lesson plans, going on "pointless courses", meetings, performance meetings.

Dealing with other people's problems all day, dealing with hard to handle kids, helping kids with their problems, helping other teachers with their problems, dealing with ***** of a senior management, getting shouted at, getting abuse, making sure kids arrive and leave safely, watching them at break time, not eating properly, fights, upset kids, kids with learning difficulties, parents, angry parents, parents evenings....

Seeing kids mature, and grow into little adults, and knowing you helped them get there
Worth all the **** ?
Click to expand...

response of the day lmfao - are you a teacher then?

Sone - do you know how much he earns and what age groups he teaches? Does he get all the holidays kids get?
 
For some crazy reason... id love to teach IT

Id imagine certain age groups could be a pain :(

Money aint great, but its ok!

Working outwith school ours seems like a BIG downfall tho :(
 
xirokx said:
thanks peeps



response of the day lmfao - are you a teacher then?

Sone - do you know how much he earns and what age groups he teaches? Does he get all the holidays kids get?
Click to expand...

Yeah, you get all the holidays, but in all seriousness its not all "holiday" you do have to prepare a tonn of work, you end up losing upto a week, with lesson plans, decorating rooms, ordering new books, marking, organising things, meetings... take half term, which is two weeks, you might get 8/9 days off but a good 3/4 days will be taken up with catching up with things you haven't done but should have done :D

Money isn't bad, but often come the end of the day / week you just want to kick back and relax and try and forget about all the hassle of work. Like a lot of jobs, but they don't deal with little ***** all day.

The joys of teaching. Honestly, it is worth it.
 
Teaching isn't the laid back job that most think it is. Sure there are many days of holiday time but there are (as said many times in this thread) many hours out of the school which gets sucked up for planning and marking. It may only be 8am until 4pm but there is not enough time in that day to the things which are needed to be done, so it means staying late and mostly using out of school time to do them. There are things which need to be done which far stretches the time that a teacher spends just standing in the front of the class teaching.

On top of that there are also badly behaved children which can make your job 10x more difficult and worse, just a single child which plays up can cause your job to go from an enjoyable and relativity easy lesson to a total nightmare. Especially if the behavior policy is bad and almost non exsistant in your school. There is also as Tummy said dealing with a poor senior team, if you do have a poor senior team and even head teacher, it can again make your job much harder than what it should be.

Having said that.. it is rewarding to teach.
 
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Interesting thread as I've got a place on the Student Associates Scheme coming up, so I get 15 days in a school getting an idea of what it's like these days (left school over 20 years ago myself). Hopefully I'll come away from it knowing whether teaching (specifically I.T. teaching) is the right thing for me to aim for once I finish my degree.
 
Im not a teacher but I would imagine the worse part of teaching IT would be teaching it to the low ability bands, they seem mega scared of computers and its almost impossible to help them enough when they are in mixed ability groups

tell your misses to find some it teachers to speak to in person, that will give her a much better idea of what the job could be like
 
i work for a private school (IT analyst not a teacher) and from what i can see the teachers put in a lot of unpaid overtime and several say they're working 7 days a week. There seems to be little stress coming from students as most of them are foreign (they live in student accomodation here) and paying £30k a year so if they misbehave they get the boot.

MW
 
My Mum is a teacher and works from 8am till about 6-7pm but is Head of Languages. She loves it and doesn't complain at all by it.

Depends on how much the person can put up to teach those who want to learn. It is really rewarding though.
 
It depends what course it is mainly. If its a good course, then your fine, but if its a bad course, well...

Our IT teachers are the most hated ones in the school, mostly because of the awful course we have (OCR Nationals)
 
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