I continue this week to report what teachers answered me when I asked them to name me, not to mention the salaries, one thing, a reality, which makes it particularly difficult to exercise their profession and to tell me, if possible, what could be done in this regard to make the profession less painful, more pleasant.
After the two secondary school teachers heard last week, here is what two primary school teachers answered me.
Ordinary classes that are no longer ordinary. Help !
Meet Élodie Yassa Roy, a passionate young teacher. This year, she teaches a very small class: only twelve students!
Before you rejoice for her, consider what she brings me. “Of these twelve students, three are children with autism spectrum disorder. Not to mention the four other intervention plans for various diagnoses. Phew! And it’s not over. “In January, I was also asked to integrate a new student from an ASD class [trouble du spectre de l’autisme]. And all this in an ordinary class! she tells me. I’ll let you do the math to find the number of students who haven’t been diagnosed with a problem of one kind or another.
Mme Yassa Roy is fortunate to have six speakers who gravitate around his class. It is not surprising that she considers them “all as essential as each other”. One of these people teaches him how the brain of his ASD students works, another manages the outbursts of sadness or anger of another student. “These speakers who are so well trained to work with our students allow us to focus on what is really our job: teaching! »
We guess however that it is not easy to do it under these conditions, that the time which one can devote to it, because of the number of the pupils in difficulty, is not that which one would wish. “The reality is that even our ordinary classes are no longer ordinary,” she told me, before making the following sad confession: “I find myself faced with a challenge that is too big for me. I’m exhausted. I can’t imagine our government wanting our onboarding support teams to be disbanded. It is impossible to expect teachers, who have no adequate training to do so, to be able to carry out this enormous task without the support of all these stakeholders. »
A solution to put on the menu of the negotiations which are starting and which could help retain teachers in the profession? According to her, it is obvious: “It is essential that teachers have the necessary help to carry out their task. »
From helicopter parents to… bomb parents
My second elementary school teacher wishes to remain anonymous.
He admits to questioning the place of school in some Quebec homes and worrying that, to put it in his own words, “many parents today no longer recognize the expertise of teachers”.
We know well in education the expression “helicopter parents”, which describes these parents worried about their offspring and who fly over the class and everything around it to monitor what is happening to them.
When we no longer recognize the teacher’s expertise, we are no longer content to skim over: we also sometimes intervene, and in an absolutely unacceptable way. After the helicopter parent, here comes the bomb parent. Our teacher says: “We sometimes observe, when a parent disagrees with a teacher, that he threatens him verbally, physically or even that he threatens to take a problematic situation to court. »
All in all, he says, what is shattered by this lack of trust in the teaching staff, added to the disengagement of some from their responsibilities, is the collaborative bond between school and family, and all of this has effects on students’ attitudes.
“How do you keep the students motivated, the teacher tells me, when in class you can hear them say: ‘My father says that…, my mother thinks that…’, that they lack support at home, that they are absent for family trips or sports competitions during school days, etc. ? The result of all this is that, every day, we have to deal with more and more disruptive behaviors, often directed at the teacher: refusal to do the work requested, excessive argumentation following an instruction, crisis when a consequence is applied…”
But how to turn the tide? It’s hard to say, especially since when parents criticize, oppose and threaten, “school and CSS managers opt for the easy solution: buy peace by complying with the parent’s demands, which adds to the the teacher’s workload, all of this being done in order to avoid media coverage of the situation”.
The fact remains that, according to him, we must act to obtain better recognition of the role of the teacher, “by leaving the stage managers for the sporting world”