Not a real job

So, says the man-in-real-world-with-real-job to the lefty idiot in classroom. You're a teacher. You got it made. Finish at three, all those holidays. It's not a real job.

Sure. My student assignments mark themselves. Curricular planning appears magically on my laptop. Magically, we anticipate agenda, delight in data, revel in rubrics, frolic through flow charts and lap up learning area plans.

But here's the truth. Education is mired in a nineteenth century learn-to-work model, with twenty-first century mandatory assessment, every kid and teacher the same, standardised up to where the sun won't shine.

Once we were 'chalkies'. But there's no easy nickname from 'Promethean Smartboard'. Now, equipment has the knowledge and we assess against a careful checklist of knowledge, understanding and skill development against an exhaustive ad nauseam backdrop of professional development and learning parameters. Once there was time to make a difference.

Our political masters make noises about responding to the needs of individual students, but mapping progress towards imposed percentile targets by testing, data, and performance standards rule out taking time over the back-stories on every class roll.

A-E reporting, Professional Standards, Quality Teaching Frameworks and a national curriculum supersede autonomy, judgment and energy to make a difference. Now I enter data and consult the computer to assess my progress. Technology knows everything. It's taught me another language.

Now, I unpack feedback impact from deep-thoughting meta-analysis via baseline intervention through end-point text synthesis to enumerate teacher collective efficacy.

There's history. Back in the eighties pedagogical mandarins safely clear of actual classrooms released a master plan of brain-scrambling genius: let the cherubs decide what they need to learn. They're far more qualified to plot their own educational, psychological and social development.

Bullying would vanish. Learners would self-improve in the rosy glow of utopian well-withal. Instant advances in self-worth, adult-level outlook and wisdom would render old-style behaviour management redundant.

With ample scientific detachment to determine optimal courses of study to serve their future aspirations, all at once children of thirty differing intellects would engage their Learning Facilitator in Socratic dialogue.

As the profession is weighed and measured with tiered ‘professional standards’, compartmentalised and ‘checked off’, good teaching is what slips through the cracks, if we find time left to build relationships with kids. If gurus above had to find each kid's elusive point of need, they may appreciate that there’s nothing standardisable in the learning journey.

Instinctive teaching devolves as schools become factories, students products and teachers tools. Boffins give us tools to teach, ideological implements rejoicing in titles like mindframe, nominated beliefs underpinning actions and effect size, a number to strive for and interpret.

Professional fulfilment flowers in special art forms: job application and interview. Professional glory hinges on rote-written rhetoric from above. Classroom under-achievers suffer measured line management that shreds anything left in the wreckage of the dissected dissident's self-esteem: words, put through the blander, that dismantle and destroy.

Words gathered like bushels of knowledge and power could be harnessed for good. Once educators were heard and respected on policy. Now, we're in-serviced to rejoice that data shows what a great job we're doing.

Once we had effective deterrents for wilful student misbehaviour. Back then, we cared voluntarily. Miraculously, many educators still do. Nevertheless, we're under Ministerial direction to demonstrate our care through goal-setting, record-keeping, check-listing, box-ticking, form-filling: digital accountability in the classroom.

But what if gurus above trusted teachers to focus solely on their students? What if we refused to reduce teaching to a formula? What if they noticed that checklist-focused, goal-setting accountability expectations are insults to the dedicated? What if we valued personal development, resilience, creativity without quantification? What if we built learning bridges instead of elaborate constructs that describe their content?

That would be a job.