I have been in this job for just 8 months now. I love it! Sometimes it all seems just to hard, then other times it is a breeze. That goes for just about anything right? I would have thought so. Currently my biggest pet peeve at my school is all the Negative Nancy's. We all know who these people are. They never see the upside to anything and can only highlight failures. I seem to work with 3 of these type of teachers. They are all negative at different levels.
Number one teacher has been teaching for 7 years. She is getting married in a months time and is getting sidetracked by all that that entails. She wants to have children so that is also playing on her mind. She needs to take leave because she is starting to burn out. At the beginning of the year she was very excited to get on with the year and slowly grow and develop the precious little minds in her classroom. She passed this passion on to me initially but now I find her odious. Nothing is ever good enough and it is starting to effect my thought processes.
Number two teacher has been teaching 15 years. She is married with 3 children. She has inspired me so much this last few months with the precision and organisation she runs her classroom in however, she is so negative about the administration side of teaching and the documentation we are expected to complete that she always complains about the amount of time it takes to plan for a single day. She is a good teacher but she is struggling to come to terms with the expectations of modern teachers.
Number three teacher is roughly 15 years experienced also. She has 3 children and is married to another teacher. She doesn't have a nice thing to say about any body or anything. She sits in her classroom and types away emails on her laptop all the time. She is an excellent teacher but as she had said herself 'she wouldn't be a teacher if it weren't for her mortgage'.
For me as a brand new teacher it is disheartening to hear such experienced people talk so negatively of this career they chose. I chose this for the love of watching children grow, my assumption is that most teachers do chose this job for that reason (please correct me if I am wrong). So with all this negativity in the air is it any wonder that the students we teach are so poorly behaved? I mean, it's been said that children are like dogs, the sense human emotions. Surely the students in their classrooms would be sensing their negativity and reacting. More to the point, how much is this negativity effecting the morale in all school globally? Is there any wonder why teachers have a poor reputation?
I don't want to sound like I don't have a single negative thought about what I do. Sometimes I utterly despise the amount of work I do over weekends but seeing a child develop because of the effort you have put into planning for their needs is totally worth it in my opinion. All I can hope is that I hang on to my passion and that I never become a Negative Nancy.
