The news that the Department is considering offering teachers past their use-by date a cash incentive to leave the profession has the common room all a-twitter. We wonder whether teachers who are not only incompetent but criminal to boot (paedophiles, to take the obvious example) might not attract a further bonus. The seriously dangerous teacher could do very well for himself. But just what constitutes a dud? Herewit
A TEN POINT GUIDE TO SPOTTING A DUD
- The dud arrives at the latest possible moment and leaves at the earliest opportunity. Like a salmon swimming upstream, the dud pushes against the tide of children as he rushes to make class before the first bell. At day’s end, his head may be seen bobbing like driftwood carried downstream by the swollen surge.
- If a teacher’s classes resemble a human version of Barrel of Monkeys or a game of Twister, he is a dud.
- If a teacher has time on his hands to read the newspaper like a spy searching for a hidden microdot, he is a dud.
- A teacher found to be feeding uncorrected work into the paper shedder is a dud.
- Bulky knits in men and anything taupe worn by women mark them as a dud.
- In the common room, duds congregate in Dud Corner. From this redoubt they descend upon a morning tea provided by the staff association like cadaver dogs. Never get between a dud and a ribbon sandwich.
- Sometimes, like the dead in The Sixth Sense, duds don’t know they’re duds. The teacher who is marking time until a) his novel is accepted by a publisher b) his talent is inevitably recognised by casting agents or c) his band lands a recording contract is kidding himself that he is committed to teaching and is in actual fact a dud.
- The teacher of long standing who extracts for each lesson from his compendious filing cabinet curling overhead projector transparencies he constructed twenty years ago (and has never varied since) is a dud.
- Teachers who hate children — surprisingly their name is legion — are duds.
- The Department, though, will have its own criteria which go something like this: if a teacher, in working many more hours than he is contracted to do, giving up lunchtimes to tutor those who need it, made to endure conditions which make a battery hen’s life seem desirable by comparison, put up with abuse from the children and their parents and indifference from his employer, should suddenly despair, like the improving story on the old primary school reader, of Trying To Please Everybody, then he is a dud.
that was the story where they ended up carrying the horse to market. I’m not a teacher but felt like it many times.
that was the story where they ended up carrying the horse to market. I’m not a teacher but felt like it many times.
Yes, Mr Diogenes, you sum it up pretty well. As a former teacher of years ago, I still have twinges of guilt about what I inflicted on students – in the interest of using modern methods, or observing the new pedagogy, or out of a slump in my motivation. From my own recollections of being a pupil,it seems however that children, so long as they have one or two teachers they can admire and even be inspired by, can get along quite well – provided they ar kept clear of damage done by the willful child haters.
However, my occasional experiences, as child and as teacher, with a bunch of collaborating, inspired teachers, including way-out unconventional minds, have taken me many orders of magnitude above the delivery of a few positives and minimal negatives that seems to be so common in schools.
So, Mr Diogenes, do you think there’s any hope at all in having teachers’ unions accept any of the various ways of appraising individual teachers, or stimulating clusters of excellence?
Maybe the dear old inspectors had some value by telling teachers like it was.
Who is Trevor Diogenes he sounds like and ex dud teacher? Takes one to know one I suppose. If one is to take issue with the performance on teachers then surely they need to look at performance not personal traits unrelated to the task of teaching. Things such as how they read the newspaper and how they dress are not relevant to any assessment of their performance. Mark this correspondence down as a dud incapable of any intelligent analysis of what constitutes a good teacher.
P.S I am not a teacher but a parent of four children in the system. Give me the spy newspaper reader in bulky knits that produces students that perform above a correspondent that just hates teachers who may be seen bobbing like driftwood carried downstream by the swollen surge of bad experiences as a child who just hates teachers.