schlackman.org

You’ve probably picked up before now that I work in a school. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of my friends are teachers. I’m well aware that a few of them will read this, so to them I say, this isn’t anything personal.

That said, I am now going to rant about my #1 pet peeve about teachers.

It’s fair to say that teachers’ holidays are somewhat infamous. The general public views them as having an enormous amount of holiday time, in particular the 5-6 weeks during the summer, but also the week or two at Easter, Christmas, and the week in the middle of each term. On top of that, they have their mystical short hours because ‘they go home at 3.45′. Most people who don’t work in education do not factor in the late hours many teachers put in at home after school on a regular basis, or that many do lesson preparation during the aforementioned holidays. Teachers themselves are the first to rant whenever there’s a discussion about ‘how easy teachers have it with all that holiday’, which is why what I am about to describe pisses me off even more.

Whenever school restarts after a break (and I guarantee this will happen on Monday, the first day back after half term) someone will ask me, “Did you have a nice break?”

No, I did not have a nice break. I did not have a break at all. I know you were just making conversation, but as IT support we are, along with the caretakers, cleaners, the Business Manager, and the Bursar, on full time contracts. We are here through Easter, Christmas, half-terms, and the entire Summer Holiday. Also, do you remember what it was like the last two terms when the heating was broken? Well, during the breaks, the entire school’s heating gets turned off entirely, so in the winter breaks, any work we have to do outside our offices is done in coats and hats.

What’s more, last Monday morning, a teacher did actually come in to do some preparation, as they sometimes do. The first thing she asked me? “Are you actually doing any work, or just Facebooking everyone?” I was hungry and on my way to lunch so I gave one of my usual dry responses on the subject and carried on, but what I felt like saying was, “Actually I’m run ragged, but it’s obvious what your plans for the afternoon are.”

It’s this attitude that annoys me. Not only are we here, but the ‘holidays’ are when we are at our very busiest, because it’s during these short windows of time that we work our way through the usually gargantuan list of improvements to the IT provision that can’t be done during term because they are too disruptive to lessons, and because during term we spend most of our time running around fire-fighting because there are 1200 students and about 150 staff who at times seem hell-bent on breaking as much as possible. This stuff takes time, almost always more than we really have, so there’s an awful lot to do before the site is once again filled with people who take us for granted a lot more often than I’m comfortable with, need everything fixing right now, and are convinced that ‘it was fine before you did x so it must be your fault it’s broken’, a handful of typical attitudes which are little more than minor irritations when faced with the view that we sit around all day during the break sipping coffee and wasting time on Facebook.

I love my teacher friends, I really do. But it is only a matter of time before I kill one of them for making the same assumption about my ‘holidays’ that the rest of the country makes about theirs.