The easiest job I ever had: classroom teacher

I had several jobs before becoming a teacher and have had many since.

Not all jobs are equally difficult.  Some jobs are all consuming, draining and traumatic.  Some jobs are uplifting, motivating and freeing.

By far the easiest job I ever had was being a classroom teacher.

At the start of my teaching career, I taught in a school where a strong and coherent purpose permeated every aspect of life.  Everyone involved in the school, from pupil to headteacher, understood the values and meaning that flowed through all of us.  If I was to attempt to summarise that purpose, I would say it was a belief that the world is better when everyone lives up to their full potential.

Every day I was eager to arrive at work and every evening I was sad to leave.  Working at the school was like being dipped in joy.  I couldn’t believe that work could be so meaningful, so powerfully energising.  This was unlike any job I had ever known – my previous experience of jobs taught me that work was an arduous battle against incompetence and bureaucracy and now I found myself with a new career where every day felt like coming to the place where I belonged.  The friendships I formed in my new workplace were rich, hilarious, encouraging, thought provoking and loving.  We all batted for each other and we all wanted the same thing for every pupil: to be their very best in their own, unique way.

As a classroom teacher, every lesson was a delight.  The pupils arrived promptly and eager to learn.  They raised the game for their peers and everyone wanted to be a part of everyone else’s success.  It was magical.  When I spoke, the pupils hung on every word.  When they spoke, every person in the class, especially me, listened with genuine interest.  To the very last, the pupils were polite, engaging, funny, interesting, determined, individual, kind, and at ease.

In the time I worked at this school, not a single day felt like work.  I adored it and now fully understood why the teachers I knew would wax lyrical about this incredible way to spend one’s adult working life.  The pupils I once taught, all adults now, still talk of their love of the place.  The curricular and the extra-curricular held equal status and every day revealed some new talent.  Dipped in joy.

Love steered my life to another part of the country, which meant leaving my beloved school.  There was absolutely no doubt in my mind about what job I would do when we moved; I would, of course, be a teacher.

I arrived at a new school expecting to continue my beautiful career with new friends and new pupils.

By far the hardest job I ever had was being a classroom teacher.

Unlike my first school, where the headteacher was a towering intellect who had created the space and energy for everyone to rise up, at my new school, the headteacher cowered away in a remote office and pupils were riotous.

Every lesson was a living Hell.  Pupils would arrive at various times to class, with each new entrance creating yet another drama or fight.  Teenagers simply ignored any request I made of them.  I was spat on, headbutted, kicked, punched, had drinks thrown over me, my car was completely destroyed on the car park one evening.  Every day, driving to work, I felt utterly sick to my stomach.  Every lunchtime, the staff would effectively barricade themselves away.  Every evening, I travelled home deflated and broken.  Every night, I would struggle to sleep.  I stopped eating.  I became more and more ill.  My personal relationships started to crumble.

I was completely unprepared and untrained to work in such a place.  But a smart woman took me under her wing and helped me see a way through.  I somehow found the energy to make it through the academic year.

It is incredibly difficult to describe in words the impact of being belittled day after day by children.  I was not a bad teacher, my lessons did not simply have to be more interesting, things would not have been better by abandoning the difficult aspects of my subject and allowing the pupils to play games.  What was happening was not my fault.  It took a long time to understand that.

Extreme poor behaviour across a school makes being a teacher a horrific job.  And I really do mean horror.  The trauma it causes is sickening.

There is no need whatsoever for such schools to exist.  Yet, they do.  In the hundreds.

As a nation, we can take a path that makes the job of being a teacher one that feels like being dipped in joy or take a path that makes it feel like living in Hell.

The difference between working in a school with good behaviour and working in one with poor behaviour is a difference so great that it is an entirely separate career.

If I had only ever worked in the type of school that was my first experience, I would view being a teacher as the luckiest job in the world.  But being a teacher is far more like a lottery.  It doesn’t have to be like this.  It is possible for every school, regardless of demographics, to be a place of purpose and meaning, a place of success and support, a place where every pupil learns well and has the desire to do so.

Insisting on high standards of behaviour and creating an environment where every single person holds every other to account is a necessary condition for creating a real school.  Without good behaviour, everything else is diminished and every pupil’s future is arrested.  Creating a school where those who work there are not broken by the experience is not just the only acceptable moral position for an employer to take, but it is the only acceptable moral position for an educational institution to take for the benefit of every one of its pupils.

I have had many jobs in my working life.  Most schools are somewhere in between my first two experiences and most teachers, thankfully, will not experience the sense of despair that comes with working in an out-of-control school.  My plea to all those who comment on or involve themselves in approaches to behaviour management in schools is, at the very least, step back for a moment and try to understand how much children and teachers lose when the conditions for good public decorum are not established and insisted upon.  Step back for a moment and try to understand how much better the world can be if every teacher is energised by their job and every teacher experiences joy.