Job Discussion Forums

[coledavis]

It's a form of the famous Peter Principle, that people get promoted to the level of incompetence. In this case, good professionals - and this means engineers and others, not just teachers - get better pay and better conditions for not doing what they're good at. I have always considered it worthwhile paying the professionals more for doing a good job rather than only rewarding managers. It's yet to catch on.

[tina20]

[Hod]

It's not true to say BC managers are in that position due to very good teaching. In fact, my main criticism of the BC is how little attention is paid to teaching.

I was once a so-called ICT coordinator at a BC. I'm still unsure what this job was, but I still had 20 or so hours a week of teaching, which to me was miles more important than my secondary job. None of my students even knew I had this ICT job.

So I was bemused when my appraisals came round to be given pages of ICT-related objectives with teaching apparently seen as secondary. If I wanted to progress with the BC, I would have had to go on ICT courses thousands of miles away and become some sort of IT wizard. As it was, I turned down such a jolly (in Dubai too, very nice) as I was supposed to be teaching, not beering it up in five-star opulence.

Meanwhile, a colleague of mine with about a year's teaching experience had a secondary job to arrange meetings of local teachers or something nondescript like that. This colleague put their all into this secondary job, and guess what? They too had 20 or so hours to teach but no time to plan a single lesson. Students quite rightly complained about the lessons. I mean, a lot of you reading this now will have studied languages in a classroom setting, and how would you feel to know your lesson was woefully under-prepared because your teacher had been mending PCs or ordering canap�s for the next local teachers' party evening?