Article published in the Timesonline.co.uk, on August 25,2009 and was written by Damian Whitworth. This is a summary and the title comes above.
During her second year as a teacher in an inner secondary school, Oenone crossley sat to a man at a dinner party who had quit as a teacher after less than a year to join the Army, he was sent to Iraq, an experience that he described as easier than teaching. The man was exaggeranting, she says now, but adds that in Iraq, ¨maybe you do not have that demoralisation and the personal attack that you have in the classroom. She says that Teach First warned her and other recruits that they would experience extreme highs and lows in schools, but I had never experienced the hard where you feel just kind of utterly destroyed.
She describes an enviroment where even those who behave find the odds against them in their chaotic home lives. This was bought home to her in the most sobering fashion, when one of her school student was stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend.
One of her most depressing abservations is that students could not understand why she was a teacher, they thought I was capable of a better job, a better job, in their opinion, being almost everything bar emptying dustbins. They see teachers being battered by students day in, day out and not receiving any respect from them. It is a weird paradox that these teenagers are obsessed by the idea of being shown respect, but fail to show any to teachers.
During her second year, struggling with exaustion and stress, Crossley started to see a therapist. She looked around at the other teachers and saw some who were¨visibly frazzled¨, others ¨had found a way of working within the system so they could function, I realised I did not want to do it¨.
She was taken a job at another school in south London. One of the criticisms of her previous school is that the boundaries were not consistent when it came to behaviour and there were few sanctions for unruliness. A lot of forms were filled in, but there were not enough detentions or other follow-up actions once students were removed from classes.
One of the biggest problem is that you can not teach 30 kids. Her new school is trying to combat this by giving the teachers more hours with the students. The idea is to find a middle way between primary school, where teachers get to know a class very well and secondary school, where they may get a pupil for two or three hours a week. ¨It is not impossible to give any student a good education. You just have to get the conditions right¨, she says.
