Guest Post: A response to Tuesday’s Guest Post by a teacher

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

Yesterday we read a passionate post you wrote, as a teacher, to help us better understand your situation and why you are choosing to strike.

Take two people:

One is a primary school teacher.  She leaves for school every weekday before 7.00am.  She walks the 10 mins to school.  She has a bag full of work she has prepared the night before, interesting, even exciting, small projects for her kids.  She is diligent, committed and takes delight in her kids’ progress. They adore her.  She returns home around 4.30pm and begins preparing the next day’s lessons.

She helps the school with sport on the weekend or is often back at the school doing other preparatory lessons.  She goes to holiday training courses but appreciates her long holidays.

The second one is also a primary teacher.  He gets to school a few minutes before 9.00am.  His class must be bedlam because he is always complaining.  He is home before 4.00pm and goes to the gym and manages a social life.  No weekend or holiday work.  

My question is this, Guest Poster.

He has been teaching for two years longer than teacher one.  He takes home more pay that she does.  Why should he?   Give me one coherent, logical answer that has an ounce of integrity, why he gets more pay than teacher one? 

How do I know all this?  They are both close family members.  That’s why.

When you and your fellow teachers accept performance pay, we will get behind your push for better pay.  Of course, teachers should be paid better.  They should be highly respected members of our community.  They could be but not while you demand equal pay for lazy, poor performers who barely do 30 hours a week and achieve little in the classroom, wrecking young lives.  

Forget sheltering them and all that collegial crap.  Don’t tell me we can’t figure out a basis for performance – businesses are doing it every day of the year. People on different levels of pay work together, happily.

Start figuring out that your union is not interested in you or your kids.  Dig a bit deeper.  Your union is a major reason for your unhappiness.  If they had an ounce of genuine commitment to the wellbeing of kids, I would pretty quickly have one family member without a job.

So, no sympathy on that score.  None.

Where I do commiserate with you is having to teach the kids of this current generation.  Poor, or no parenting, fatherless kids, drugs, drink, low pay has created an unattractive lot of kids.  No space to offer solutions here, except one.  Divide all the education vote (including the useless Wellington bureaucrats’ pay) by the number of kids needing schooling and have the money go with the child.  

Schools would have to go out and get kids to come to their school to earn an income.  It would turn the incentives on their head and improve the situation for you, as a teacher immediately and permanently.  Schools would start working with parents because their life would depend on it.  It would fix a heap of truancy and classroom behaviours, get kids to school fed and ready to learn and help deal with the growing psychological and medical issues haunting educators.

Owen Jennings

P.S.  Taking time to learn Te Reo yourself and to instil it into your class at the expense of reading, maths and critical thinking is only making things worse.  It’s a dead language that has limited value in life.  Swallow your virtue signalling and stick to basics.