Should you become a teacher? I find it hard to recommend the job to people these days.
Some of my older colleagues will tell you that teaching has changed so much since they started. In even the 10 years I’ve been doing the job, I’ve felt changes.
- The Junior Cert becoming the Junior Cycle, and all its attendant problems.
- The discordant unionisation of teaching and its commoditisation of teacher security.
- The Croke Park Agreement.
- The pay gap and the insincerities of the old guard.
- The strikes, the recriminations, the smear campaigns.
In the end, June, July and August almost become the only things worth recommending.
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Trade unionism is a great thing. Having three unions in teaching is not a great thing. It’s quite a bad thing, in fact.
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I’m not a member of any of them, and here’s why.
A union would fight for pay equality or fair pay. What happened in 2011 was a betrayal of that idea. Teachers before that date would remain at a higher salary band that would increase exponentially every year. Those who came into the profession afterwards, including yours truly, would be virtually locked at a lower band. My annual increase is in double-digits. I once joked that my partner is with me for my money because I earn €50 more a year than she does.
The unions have spent years making performative protests about the pay inequality. If those same unions were told by the Government: “Look, the country can’t afford to pay you all more money. We’re still in a deficit and our bailout loans and the interest haven’t been repaid. How about this – we will lower your salaries slightly and raise the post-2011 teachers’ salaries slightly, and you can meet in the middle.” What do you think they’d say?
If you’re naive enough to believe that the old guard would pull a Samson act, then perhaps you should go into teaching.
Most of my colleagues are shocked that I’m not in a union. They make the same depressing argument every time: “What are you going to do if a student accuses you of touching them or something, and how are you going to afford the legal counsel?”
Was this the foundational principle that gave birth to the beauty of trade unionism? Covering your ass in litigious times.
My response to this is also the same: “If I were in serious, career-ending trouble, do you think the unions are going to break the bank getting a little old dues payer top-flight legal representation? I’d rather call up my family and use all my connections.”
The other reason I don’t trust the unions is that they are in competition with one another. They want more members, more dues. That’s the wrong priority. I was in one school where two different colleagues had negotiated different pay deals with the school’s management because they were in opposing unions.
We’re all supposed to be paid the same.
I could work alongside someone who only teaches Junior Cycle, but they could easily be paid more than me, even though I teach Leaving Cert every year.
Any prospective teacher reading this will have to make these kinds of choices.
Would I recommend it?
That really all depends.
Perhaps a bit of optimism.
I’ve had some wonderful classes over the years, wonderful students. As I type this, there’s a flurry of activity around me. My first-year students are putting the finishing touches to a class newspaper they’ve been working on for the past two weeks. My most capable student, whom I made the editor, is walking the room, checking in with the other groups, making sure their articles are finished and will fit in their assigned spot in the paper for which another student laid out the space.
There’s a lovely bonhomie in the room.
These are the classes that remind me what’s good about the job - when an idea comes together and there’s a wellspring of achievement and enjoyment.
Many people have mistakenly gone into teaching thinking it’s going to be like Dead Poets Society or Mr Holland’s Opus. It’s not. But I’ve had one or two redemptive moments that have made me at least think of films like these.
In one school, I fell afoul of a particularly difficult parent. They made all sorts of trouble for me. I was new to the school, so I didn’t have the benefit of a reputation that would stand to me or serve as some counterpoint in the discourse. The principal, following up on the complaint, used to stand outside my class listening (a fact she revealed to me at the end of the year). At the end of the year, we had a final meeting. By this stage, I’d already had my interview to return to the school next year.
I was unsuccessful.
My colleague, who’d also joined that year, beat me.
It was a weird interaction. Already spurned but receiving hollow-sounding praise about how good I was, how I’d been such an addition to the school. This principal conducts one-on-one meetings with every sixth-year student before they leave. She basically asks for the dirt. What teachers are crap or good and why. My principal had already decided not to rehire me before she began these meetings. When we had our parting-of-ways in her office, she sheepishly conceded that the sixth-year students spoke very highly of me.
I may not have got a job, but at least I got a good reference out of it, which secured me my next position.
Not exactly Robin Williams being publicly fired while a raft of loyal students bellow, “O, Captain! My Captain!” from atop their desks, but I took it gladly all the same.
