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Hah, I get Youtube at work. Only the teachers though. We even get Facebook, apparently, though I've not had time to check.

I'm teaching at the moment, it's fairly stressful but over here it's also fairly well paid, and you can't sneeze at the holidays. It is sort of draining and tiring though, because of the rate you have to work at. I think I'd rather teach in the UK, except that I fundementally disagree with some aspects of their education system. (The 11+ is still going, right?)

I've always fancied going into teaching, and I still hope to do so in the future.

I think the greatest stress I would come under in Teaching would be worrying that I was failing my students. I mean, it's a position of terrific responsibility. You're the students main point of contact with the world outside of their family and friends, the 'Great Neutral'.

People remember good Teachers. People remember bad Teachers. But people only really talk about Bad Teachers.

To give an example, I used to work for my old Secondary School. There was a kid there in the year below who was a nasty piece of work. He had a good brain in his skull, but was just a little git to all and sundry. Somewhere, society and his family had failed him. For whatever reason, he just couldn't get with the programme. I suspect that a crap family life, combined with a crap Primary Teacher (who can actually be more important than Parents to some kids) failed him badly. Net result? When I went back to work there, a body was found in woods not far from my house. Heavily dismembered, carrying an unborn child.

He'd murdered her. For money.

That sort of failure is something I'd dread. To know that had you tried a little harder, been a little stricter, not turned a blind eye once in a while, he might have got himself sorted.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:I've always fancied going into teaching, and I still hope to do so in the future.

I think the greatest stress I would come under in Teaching would be worrying that I was failing my students. I mean, it's a position of terrific responsibility. You're the students main point of contact with the world outside of their family and friends, the 'Great Neutral'.

This thought scares me all the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

Which oddly is encouraging, and I reckon that like constant fretting about performance makes a better parent, it also makes you a better Teacher.

Whilst you can never become too friendly with your students, you should always be approachable to them, and as neutral as you can be.

It is a bit distressing sometimes MDG, but at the end of the day it's important that you realise that you cannot be responsible for their actions all the time. You do your best, your absolute best, and you should care about them and try, but burning yourself out fighting against terrible home lives and the like does no one any good.
Agreed about terrible primary school teachers though- those fethers do feth all.

Teaching can be stressful. I find most of the stress I get is from the administrative arm of the Uni and the board of edjimacation. At elementary, or primary, the 1s-3s are at volume 11 all the time. Half of the job is to make sure they don't kill themselves by accident and to keep crying incidents and teasing to a minimum. The other half of the time is actual teaching which can be fun, but also terrible. If a bumble bee or some other large bug enters the classroom, the lesson is effectively over. A higher power has decided that your class is sucking too much to continue. 4s-6s, a lot of them are too cool for school and don't want to do much of anything. They learnt the phrase "I don't know" and apply it as liberally as possible. Sweeping generalisations, I know.

Uni kids are lazy, but you can talk about video games during the breaks. Generally, they are either hungover, tired from their part-time jobs, thinking about lunch, thinking about whether somebody else likes them as much as they like that person, or anything else under the Sun. There are the ones who are serious into their education too, but they are a minority. They call them sesame grinders here or brown nosers back in the West.

There are wayyyyyy worse jobs than teacher. I think that a person's outlook on life plays more into whether they find their job stressful or not. Not drinking through the week helps too.

Khornholio wrote:
. Not drinking through the week helps too.

Lol

The constant worry about failing the kids is a problem, and it is not helped by the fact that the same people who pay lip service to "make sure you get some rest" are far more constantly either demanding X, Y or Z task from you, or worse, simply making insidious hints that you are sleeping too long each night and ought to actually surrender your own life to the school fully.

In the end, you can only stay sane if you set yourself limits and stick to them

Fifty wrote:The constant worry about failing the kids is a problem, and it is not helped by the fact that the same people who pay lip service to "make sure you get some rest" are far more constantly either demanding X, Y or Z task from you, or worse, simply making insidious hints that you are sleeping too long each night and ought to actually surrender your own life to the school fully.

In the end, you can only stay sane if you set yourself limits and stick to them

Yeah. I went t o a professional committee meeting with the principal and his beef with
us (thinly veiled as a request) was he wanted more "volunteers" for tasks even though
some of us are stretched thin as it is.

I still think there are jobs with either more stress or less pay.