Teachers strike on Queen St in Auckland in 2019. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Teachers strike on Queen St in Auckland in 2019. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Opinion by Peter Wills
OPINION:
“For the good of the kids, for the good of the kids, for the good of the kids,” I say to myself as I sit at 10pm planning tomorrow’s lessons.
This is my fourth year of teaching science and maths in Auckland and Rotorua. You’d think it would begetting easier by now. It’s not.
Covid-19 has been tough for the teaching profession. Like all of New Zealand, we’ve been working overtime, covering colleagues, helping to patch all the little holes in the broken system. We were happy to do it though, being a team of five million and all that. We’d hoped that by now we’d start to see things getting better. We’d hoped that the Government would have recognised that there was a shortage of teachers. We’d hoped that there would have been an effort made to systematically fill education’s growing gaps.
Instead, we’re going above and beyond even more than we were before the pandemic.
Even if it’s just to help that one child to learn one more fact, to pass one more test, to get that one step closer to the pathway for their future.
In the moment, how could you look a child in the eye and do anything other than help?
You may have heard that secondary teachers are planning to go on strike. Here’s the secret: we’ve been striking since January. Last year, an agreement was reached that we’d stop our free service of covering colleagues.
The hope of the strike was that the Government would notice that in order to keep the system afloat, teachers had been sacrificing their planning time. That means for several years we’d been sacrificing the time we should use to plan great lessons to instead cover classes.
Prior to the strike, if we couldn’t find enough relievers to cover a day’s lessons, teachers were told “sorry you’re covering this class today”. This pushes planning time back until, well, tonight, because after school you have your sports practices, department meetings, and all the other labour needed to keep a school afloat. This has been particularly hard for our heads of department and senior leaders, who have had to sacrifice the time they should be spending making schools better, to teach classes that would otherwise have no teacher.
Sometimes those relief lessons are great. A spontaneous lesson with an experienced teacher can be filled with great opportunities to teach valuable life and curriculum lessons. For the relieving teacher though, it means working late into the night doing the work they should have been doing during the day. Sometimes the planning, improvement or lesson preparation work just can’t be done. Not having time to plan is a big deal when the classes you most need to plan for are the ones with the highest needs.
In other professions like medicine, when a junior doctor covers for someone else they’re paid a bit extra, known as “cross cover”. That acknowledges the extra workload but more importantly, disincentivises not having enough doctors in the hospital. Teaching in New Zealand doesn’t have this.
We would love Government to sit down with teachers to discuss the real issues in education. There’s plenty of great ideas in this space - some solutions we could implement right now.
The most pressing issue is that there aren’t enough teachers for our children. I hear regularly from talented people who would move into teaching if the pay was better and they had time to do the job right.
Peter Wills is a fourth-year Maths and Science teacher in Rotorua.
If we want to Build Back Better we need to invest in education like we need to invest in infrastructure. After all, it’s our kids who will be zoning, planning, designing, and building all the new pipes and roads, the new forests and farms, the new schools and hospitals.
We’re striking so your kids can have teachers with the time to create great lessons for your children. Investing in teachers is investing in our kids. Investing in our kids is investing in New Zealand’s future.
On Thursday March 16, in your towns, you’ll see teachers on the streets campaigning for your child’s future. If you want a great teacher in every classroom with the time to plan great lessons that meet every child’s needs, then let the people in your life know why you support the teachers’ strike action. Ultimately, this is for the good of the kids.
Peter Wills is a fourth-year Maths and Science teacher in Rotorua.
