Life

Class War: Why one Northern Ireland teacher isn't going back to school next week

As the new school year starts, one teacher - the anonymous author of Class War: A Teacher's Diary - explains why he isn't returning to the classroom after a 25-year career teaching in and around Belfast

Many teachers are getting on with their lives while carrying inside them a weight of stress and pressure which they simply think of as 'just the job'
Many teachers are getting on with their lives while carrying inside them a weight of stress and pressure which they simply think of as 'just the job' Many teachers are getting on with their lives while carrying inside them a weight of stress and pressure which they simply think of as 'just the job'

TS Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: "April is the cruellest month."

Not for teachers, it isn't.

The cruellest month is only a few days away.

Primarily I'm talking about the teachers who have been there a few years; maybe 10, 15, 20 years. They know what I'm talking about. I argue in Class War that the life-span of the job should be 20 years.

After that, you've got no more to give. After that, you're going through the motions. After that, it's just a job. But it shouldn't be just a job; teaching is too important for that. As WB Yeats said, "Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail."

But a lot of teachers are just filling that pail. Why? Because they are demoralised, because they are tired, because they have had enough. OK, so loads of people are hacked off with their work. But teaching is supposed to be different, isn't it? Oh, but it's different alright.

The National Foundation for Educational Research found that teachers endure greater job-related stress than any other professionals. The NFER report concluded that one in five felt tense about the job most or all of the time. A recent report from the NASUWT, the teachers' union, stated that one in four teachers in the UK and Ireland experience physical or verbal violence from their pupils at least once a week.

Class War: A Teacher's Diary by Anonymous
Class War: A Teacher's Diary by Anonymous Class War: A Teacher's Diary by Anonymous

When I had finished my book I passed the manuscript to a friend of mine who is a counsellor for Relate. After reading it, he looked at me with concern. "That bad?" I asked. "No," he said, "I'm just worried about you."

He said that the second half of the book read like someone in the midst of a breakdown. I laughed and assured him that was not the case. I caught the next words in my throat, about to say that it was just the job. Just the job? It made me consider how many teachers are getting on with their lives while carrying inside them a weight of stress and pressure which they simply think of as 'just the job'.

I talk throughout the book of the mental health crisis affecting children and young adults. But what of those others who don't even realise they are in crisis?

I remember a few years back and a colleague in his mid-fifties who took a minor heart attack (incidentally, I've never understood that word 'minor' in front of heart attack).

I visited him in his home as he was convalescing. I expected him to be down, depressed, contemplating his mortality. Instead, he was happy as Larry, ready to milk his sick-leave to the full and delighted that this would be a good foot in the door to early retirement with a decent redundancy package.

I got out.

I escaped.

Maybe I'll hook up with the September 1st Club, a group of retired teachers who meet on said date every year to raise a number of glasses to never having to endure another 'training' day or write another behaviour report or read another missive from whatever oracle – in the loosest sense of oracular - happens to be Education Minister.

Class War narrates my last five months in the job but ranges over my 25 year career teaching in and around Belfast. I like to think it is honest and illuminating (then again there was my mother's critique: "The language is awful. I can't send that to your Uncle Eddie").

It is written anonymously. I didn't see any other way. If I had put my name to it then any random pupil, parent, colleague, could have decided I was writing about them and that might have caused no end of trouble.

I was also worried about those most selective of readers who might put a few paragraphs together and suddenly the place where I worked was a hell-hole. It isn't. I have a great admiration for my colleagues and that school and others where I have worked.

I think teachers are heroes. I don't use that word at all lightly. During the pandemic, we learned who the essential workers are, the people who keep the show on the road, without whom society would be a hell-hole.

Class War: A Teacher's Diary asks questions about the demands faced by teachers, years of underfunding, lack of proper training and the increasing alienation of young people
Class War: A Teacher's Diary asks questions about the demands faced by teachers, years of underfunding, lack of proper training and the increasing alienation of young people Class War: A Teacher's Diary asks questions about the demands faced by teachers, years of underfunding, lack of proper training and the increasing alienation of young people

The book asks questions about the, at times, barely tolerable demands of the job, about years of systematic underfunding, lack of proper training, the increasing alienation of young people.

It was written pre-pandemic but the same conditions still exist and I like to think that the pandemic will change everything and those whose work is invaluable will be regarded as such. Then again, we see that nurses are threatening to go on strike again over the insulting pay rise they've been offered.

As I say in the book, we must stop accepting the quite calculated humiliation in our public services by a gang of wind-bags, narcissists and hypocrites; preening, ideological thugs who hadn't the first clue what to do when the pandemic hit and it came to putting the lives of others above their devotion to themselves and the free market economy and who were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands as a result.

What to do? I quote Shelley:

"Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake to earth you chains like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you

Ye are many – they are few."

Yet, for all of the above, Class War is not a work of social science or a polemic. No, it isn't. Honestly.

As I said, it is personal. And I also like to think it's funny. I found a voice in the entries and then realised it was my own everyday voice – a black, scabrous, slightly hysterical voice.

I had become slightly hysterical or, as I put it in the final page, a "snarling, wolfish man". I argue that this is what the job had turned me into.

And that is why I wrote Class War.

And that is why I quit.

Class War: A Teacher's Diary by Anonymous - a former Northern Ireland secondary school teacher - is published in hardback by Biteback Publishing at £16.99.