Thank you for posting your perspective. It’s certainly eye opening.Ex teacher here. There was a noticeable shift during the pandemic regarding respect for teachers and education in general. They whip their kids out whenever they feel like it, forgetting that I plan lessons. Your kid misses a week on fractions, I’m going to have to plan for that and differentiate because they don’t have that knowledge that I have spent an entire week imparting to their class group. This typically takes up the time of my poor teaching assistant who has to reteach fractions and support that one student when they should be supporting the entire class group.
Behaviour went down the pan during the pandemic as both the government and parents viewed us as being merely childcare for their little darlings. There’s no respect at all for teachers. It’s weird as growing up I was taught that teachers were to be respected and that what they said, I did. I wouldn’t have dreamed of backchatting to a teacher! Now you get abused by kids on the daily, attacked physically and have to deal with the parents on top of that.
I recently met up with peers that I trained with. Out of 30 of us who originally trained as teachers, only 11 of us were still teaching. It’s a sad sorry state of affairs.
Someone I know has whipped their kids out of school for a ‘last minute sunshine break.’ They went back to school what, two weeks ago? And they have another week off in three weeks anyway?