time to breathe

I’ve been fairly quiet on here for a while now – I’ll be honest, not through choice.  For the past seven years I have been quite busy.  Partly that is because I went and got myself some twin sons, but also because my job has taken over my  life more than I thought it would.  For the past seven years I have had a job – my first permanent job – on the north coast of the island.  It has been a full-on-non-stop-no-time-to-breathe sort of a job.  You may have noticed that teachers occasionally… or maybe, often… or quite possibly, incessantly… complain about being under paid and over worked; well for the past seven years I have actually been under paid and over worked.  Today that ends.  Well the job does anyway, maybe not the work or the pay thing – the job ends.  Today is my last day in this school before I move to a school in the city; and I can honestly say I’m going to miss the place.

I don’t know how education is valued where you come from, but here in Northern Ireland I can safely suggest that there is a bit of a crisis in our school systems.  Education in Northern Ireland is under immense pressure and has been for some time now.  Years of under investment have led to headlines such as “NI schools need extra £240m just to stand still”, “NI principals demand urgent meeting over budget cuts”, “NI schools in the red: Education system faces £350m funds gap”, with principals threatening to put their schools into serious debt rather than compromise the quality of the education provided to their pupils.  There’s a lot of buck passing going on and, to be honest, the politics of the whole thing would require a long dedicated post of this own, so I will move on.  Suffice to say that the job has changed completely since I started out.  We now have to fight for every outing and justify the cost of every programme; we have to use out dated classroom technology; we now have to print double sided pages (I know, right?)     

For me personally this has led to teaching larger classes, with ever widening ability ranges;  I work to tighter deadlines and spend more of my life doing paperwork; I have to think more carefully before I use resources knowing that repairs and replacements will be coming out of a school budget that is straining at the seams.  I have not had a pay rise in years (either in real terms or actual terms)  My take home pay is significantly less than it was when I started teaching in this school.

Today I am working harder than I did seven years ago, I have less non-teaching time than I did seven years ago, I have more paperwork than I did seven years ago, I’m under more pressure professionally than I was seven years ago, I feel less valued professionally than I was seven years ago, and I get paid less than I did seven years ago.

But what hasn’t changed in those seven years is the feeling I get from teaching a class something new – something they didn’t know before, but do now; the feeling I get when a class just get something – and that they get it because of something I did.

I’ll really miss this place.  I loved teaching there.  I have so much time for the kids that go there.  There’s also a genuinely unique atmosphere in the place – it was so different to anywhere I had ever taught before.  But most of all I will miss the staff; they are amazing.  I don’t know if it is despite the challenges they face or because of them – but they are some of the best human beings around. 

So if you are connected to that wee school by the sea –as a teacher, a pupil, a classroom assistant, a caretaker, a cleaner, a cook, a clericalist- please consider this post as my heartfelt salute to you.  I admire you more than I can say and I will remember you for a very long time.

For the rest of you, let’s see if my new position allows more time for blog writing.  I doubt it; my gut feeling is that it’s not just my old school facing the pressures I described.  I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow.