For various reasons, I’ve been thinking about stress. More specifically, stress relating to the work that people do. As we bed in to the holiday spell (for some, I have read, quite literally), there will be people reading this who find themselves wondering where they will find the strength from to go back into work.
While everyone will experience work-related stress from time to time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that some jobs are apparently more stressful than others. This universally-accepted truth is riffed upon beautifully in an old Mitchell and Webb sketch, which I won’t link to because it gets a bit post-watershed towards the end. The scenario drawn is one partner coming home from a tough day at work as a paediatrician, working with sick and dying children; the running gag is his earnest desire to reassure his partner, whose job entails tasting new products at an ice-cream factory, that their careers are both equally important and equally pressurised. “Just because I’m a paediatrician dealing with severely ill children, doesn’t mean that you can’t have a tough day tasting ice cream,” he says.
People have wildly varied takes on the levels of stress that they assume come with classroom teaching. Some people seem irrevocably wedded to the idea that teachers are work-shy layabouts who finish at 4.00pm on the days that they do work, plus luxuriate in an almost unlimited supply of holiday time when they don’t. I lost count of the number of times someone hurled the “long holidays” at me like it was a brilliant gotcha. After a while, I used to hurl it back. “Teaching is a fantastic job,” I would say. “Did you know that there is currently an enormous drive to get more people into teaching, so given how convinced you are of the benefits, shall I send you a link to the courses that are recruiting? You even get paid to train!” That usually shut them up.
There have always been people who think that teaching’s a breeze. There are plenty of others who believe that it is horribly stressful. At times, they were right. While the average classroom teacher will not find themselves in charge of a multi-million pound budget, nor will they find themselves in a position where they are hiring and firing, nor indeed are they likely to find themselves presenting their work to a roomful of demanding CEOs, I’d like to see those same CEOs try their hand at managing a roomful of Year 10s on a hot afternoon when there’s a wasp in the room.
Let’s be honest. My subject, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively unimportant. While I can bang the drum of what A Good Thing Latin is for all students, let’s not be silly about this: whether or not a student attains a respectable grade in their Latin GCSE is not going to affect their life-chances (unless their life-plan is to become a Professor of Classics, and even then there are ways around that particular problem). However, most Latinists who work – as I did – in the state sector, will find themselves expected to earn their keep by offering at least one other mainstream subject. For me, that was English. As a result, I have found myself solely responsible for the GCSE English grades of several cohorts. This has included sets where there was an enormous focus on what used to be the C/D borderline and sets where their chances of making it to that borderline were considered slim. This, in very real terms, meant that I was directly responsible for a student’s life chances. I am not being over-dramatic, I don’t think. In all honesty, whether a child attains a pass grade in both English and Maths will shape their destiny in ways that few people outside education are fully aware of. A child who does not attain their GCSE English and Maths is largely condemned to a life on minimum wage. This may sound over-dramatic, but it is broadly true. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, including many successful entrepreneurs who take pride in citing their scholarly failures as a badge of honour. I’m glad for them that they overcame this hurdle, but a hurdle it is, and one which proves impossible for the majority to overcome. I have never cried more tears of joy than when my students who had been classified as unlikely to pass managed to do so. For them, it quite literally meant the difference between poverty and a fighting chance. These kids, by the way, fought me every step of the way and if they’d had their way they never would have sat the exam in the first place. That, I would argue, is a considerable pressure, one faced by thousands of teachers across the country every year: helping kids to get over a barrier, with them quite literally doing everything in their power to remain behind it.
Another factor which many people fail to appreciate is the number of safeguarding concerns that your average teacher is exposed to during their career. I never specialised in pastoral care and did not do any training in the field of safeguarding beyond that which is expected of anyone working with young people, yet in my time I came across cases of neglect, of child sexual exploitation, of child criminal exploitation, of illegal drug use and more besides. On the penultimate day of my 21 years at the chalkface I became aware of what I was concerned could be a potential case of FGM and was urgently summoning Designated Safeguarding Leads to my classroom for advice, all while maintaining a calm demeanour and continuing to run the classroom and teach my lessons as if nothing were afoot. This is the kind of thing that teachers do every day and I am not sure whether other people realise this. We don’t talk about it much, partly because it’s not appropriate, but partly because it is – or has become – the norm. It is not unusual for teachers to be working with children who are experiencing genuine trauma; it is not unusual to be painfully aware of some deeply troubling circumstances that a child may be experiencing at home.
For most of my career, I loved my job. I also considered it a considerably less stressful deal than others experienced by more high-powered friends who managed large budgets or were responsible for people’s livelihoods in their business. Yet sometimes I would remind myself that I was, in many ways, responsible for people’s livelihoods. A teacher can shape someone’s future in unimaginable ways and their influence – for better or for worse – can dictate which doors are open and which ones are closed in the future. If you are a teacher, never underestimate that power.
