This week’s unsolicited advice is about teachers. You can find all columns via Spotify, this edition can be found here:

Listen to this column on BNR (Dutch)
Listen to this column on Spotify (Dutch)

Teachers!

Last weekend I read a great piece in the NRC, editor Patricia Veldhuis spent the past year as a special intern at a school, where she also taught and the result is a beautiful piece about the vulnerability you have to deal with as a teacher (Do am I doing it right? How do I ensure that students pay attention and learn what I want them to learn?)

I would actually like to copy the entire piece here, as a teacher it was really hitting it close, but let’s pick out a few parts.

What did you think was most important?

The most relevant thing for everyone to hear is the enormous work ethic of teachers that is evident from the piece. The cliché of “plenty of vacation” is expertly undermined, teachers, even in the most positive scenario without overtime, work more than their contractual hours throughout the year and therefore earn their vacations themselves.

And in addition, almost every teacher at her school structurally works more than those hours, for example people who work 4 days on paper, but are simply at school for 5 days, for example to prepare or consult. I find that image very recognizable. I don’t want to put anyone’s stress down, but when I hear colleagues at university complain about the workload due to many meetings, I think: “Yes, you really do that yourself, you really don’t have to do everything”.

On a school day I sometimes literally don’t have time to go to the toilet, but you really have to experience that at most higher education institutions or offices!

Furthermore, the administrative pressure is simply unprecedented, everything a student does (forget a book, leave homework unfinished, go to the doctor) has to be recorded and if you are unlucky, you also have to answer to a parent for it. Time for administration and meetings has increased in recent years from 10 percent to now 40 percent, also under pressure from parents who want to be able to keep track of exactly what is happening in a classroom, including in secondary education!

Speaking of parents… that wasn’t the only education news that caught your eye this week, right?

No, maybe it’s selection bias, but Trouw also had a nice and relevant piece about differentiation in the classroom. In many primary schools you have within a class, say a group of 5, level groups, the stars, suns and moons, for example, which are then explained separately. Teachers find this annoying, because it is a lot of extra work to explain three times separately, but more importantly, research shows that it is not necessarily better for the faster students, but very bad for the slower students , because the teacher will no longer hold them to high standards in the slower group, and because they cannot learn from classmates who are further along. The reason why these types of interventions have been introduced is clearly not the research that shows that it is not a good idea, but the society, which mainly consists of parents who say that their little prince is not challenged enough. Their worst image is that their child is bored at school, but as a result, policies are introduced that mean that other students learn much less, just like the administrative pressure at a secondary school, a sign that the outside world simply does not know what is good for schools and for students, and We have to stop shouting about how things should be different.

That’s why a big compliment to Veldhuis, who, instead of typing opinions, has experienced it himself and substantiated it and tells it honestly.

Yes, back to the NRC and the advice!

The most moving part of the NRC article is at the end, when students at school ask an overworked colleague why he actually remains a teacher, why he still likes the profession. We have to read his response literally, the man says:

‘There are a lot of professions where you die a little every day on the inside. I don’t have that feeling here. And that’s because of you.’

You simply cannot describe the teaching profession more aptly. You with your spreadsheets, meetings, days off and I don’t know what you have in the business world, with your great salaries and a nice lease car on the sidewalk, enjoy it, but we education people do not have a midlife crisis, we do not have to to ask ourselves “what we do it all for”, because that is crystal clear every day.

So here is the advice to the teachers of the Netherlands (and beyond)

Don’t be fooled, we have the best profession there is, and let’s all ensure that we can continue to do that profession without input from outside! They don’t know what they’re talking about.