The job of a teacher is by far one of the most tedious jobs there can be, at least it's the most tedious I have done and to say the truth, what you see on the outside does not even come close to what the real job of a teacher entails.
On the outside, we see a teacher on the white/blackboard happily teaching students who are attentively listening right? In real life, it's a bit more complex than that.
First of all, Every week a teacher is to write a lesson plan for everything she is going to teach, there are strict templates you have to follow and then you follow this template for every single subject you are going to teach for next week, if you teach nine subjects, you will have to write a lesson plan for your nine subjects one by one following the stipulated template, and you do it unfailingly every week, I promise you, this is not fun at all, I have seen many educators and one common thing about all of them is that they all had to come to accept that it is necessary and then find a way to make the process of doing it less cumbersome for yourself, but there's no running away from it. That has nothing to do with the fact that you are expected to have your lesson plan and research plan in place too.
One other part of the job that outsiders see as fancy but it's not is marking notebooks. Now the rule for every class is that as soon as you are done teaching and writing notes on the board, the students are expected to submit their notes to you to mark them. Then you give classwork-they submit, you mark, you give assignments, they submit it and you mark. Nobody wants to know what time you'll use for all these, but even if you have a class of a hundred students, you have to mark one hundred notes, one hundred class works, and one hundred assignments every single day, even for very passionate teachers, that is drop-dead exhausting considering that the teacher has to go through each one with the intent to find things to correct, make comments in the notes and call students to account for what they write, that is where you catch the pupils with bad writing, students who don't pay attention, students who don't write and so on.
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| Agnes Onyekwere taking an extra class after school |
One other thing that is often seen as fancy and usually downplayed is the ability to keep students in check during classes. If you have been an educator long enough you'll know that having a perfectly quiet and attentive class at all times is a myth, the students are human beings and robots and sometimes when they are in their elements, you have to find strategies and methods just to keep them in a place. This class management part can be a serious hassle for teachers who teach a large class, you constantly lose your voice and patience all at the same time, in real life-its not funny at all.
People are usually quick to state that teachers are mostly back home early from work, they close from work by 2pm except if they run extra classes but what no one sees is the fact that it is an almost impossible job for someone who is not a morning person because for teachers to be in school at 7am, they must have been awake for hours before then to prepare themselves. Waking up that early is no easy feat. This is not a nine-to-five, these guys are on ground before the nine-to-fivers arrive, salute!
So every day a teacher has to attend the assembly, coordinate many children to stand in single files and sing the national anthem, inspect them and give them advice after that is done, the teachers now have to wait for a meeting every day with the school management-I have no idea they do that, I think this part is highly unnecessary. Why do you have to meet every day? Spend quality precious time just standing and talking about things that could easily be placed in the school Whats App group.
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