This So-Called Socrates

Far be it from me that I should mock the profession that I worked in (and still work in, to some extent), but… okay, I’ve been making fun of the plight of a fellow teacher who has a pile of grading to get done (yes, that’s his site, go visit it).

I should be sympathetic. Especially when they talk about arriving home at 8pm, and just plain saying ‘screw this marking’ that just has to be done. Been there. Done that. Notoriously stayed WAY too late on campus, ‘just to finish a few emails’ in the office after helping with a social event, to discover that working from 7am to 2am was well into ludicrous territory and right out the other side into… well, I call it ‘Narita International Airport‘ when things become so surreal that the intersection of your working and personal life is practically an art installation.

But of course, when reading this teacher’s plight on Facebook – I forget all that and launch into seduction techniques that could be used on the papers, in order to make the experience more palatable. I am sorry, Matt, and you have every right to mock me in a few weeks when I do some grading myself. You can feel perfectly within your rights to post sneers and jeers to your little dissected-frog heart’s content and turn on all the bunsen-burners in the lab in a mini-bonfire of the vanities if you wish. Hell, crack open a whole new packet of highlighters and get a brand-new fluffy eraser for the whiteboard – go wild, Matt!

Well, that used to cheer me up no end.

Other things that cheered me up when I had too much grading? Working with other teachers helped, to do grading in a round-table scenario. At Swanbourne, it was well-known that teachers would ‘park and mark’ – you drive your car to the shorefront, grade whilst sitting in your car looking out across the ocean and it would seem less stressful. When it was end-of-year grading, the team would even write up anonymous quotes from some ‘classic’ responses on an internal-office whiteboard, just to cheer ourselves up.

We used to think that maybe, maybe, a book could be collated with some of the more wacky essay paragraphs that would cross our desks – which we’d call ‘This So-Called Socrates’. It hailed from a Philosophy paper response I got:

This so-called Socrates (who clearly ripped off the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix with his Allegory of the Cave) has a lot to answer for with his theory of the elenchus, because nothing makes people less likely to be philosophical than going on about stuff you don’t know anything about.

You don’t say…

I guess I’m also writing this because I was reminded how George Hrab on his most recent podcast mentioned that his ‘indestructible’ father (who is apparently so ridiculously healthy that he’s only missed one day of work, due to doing his back in when reroofing his roof) – was hanging scenery for the school play and broke his arm at the age of sixty-six. Which then led me to reflect on something else I wrote in an email about the notion of teaching as a ‘vocation’.

Because let’s face it. Maybe there is something to the theory that teachers are just plain weird to be the sort of people who will fret about unfinished work after a thirteen-hour day; forget that they have a home to go to after a more than thirteen-hour day, and do work that is physically and mentally draining beyond what is typically considered retirement age and so forth.

I ended up writing in an email the following about teaching, when the profession was discussed without reference to the word ‘vocation’. Because whilst a number of years in the same job may be rare in more modern times, in teaching it just didn’t seem really that unusual.

But then, it depends if you mean ‘the same job in the same institution’ or ‘in the same profession‘ too.
I guess this is where the notion of ‘vocation‘ comes into it. Those who hail from (or are aware of some of the elements of) a Catholic background, could probably understand how it has a significant link to the idea of being ‘born to the job’, particularly since it was usually religious institutions that produced educators in the past. I have heard that the Catholic Education Office in my state is situated in a former monastery which produced teachers, for example.

In Australia, people leaving teaching has been traced to several factors -  such as after five years after graduation, both nursing and education graduates have fallen behind the median salary for all graduates from other subjects; the growth of other job opportunities; changing technologies; median age of teachers and retirement; social factors, et al. As George Hrab’s mother, who returned to be a relief teacher, implied about the influence of the administration aspects that you get less of if you’re not tied to curriculum demands – “No regrets… more of the same stuff, more and more and more…”

Why continue to be employed in a profession that doesn’t really ‘reward’ in a quantitative sense? I suspect the answer is more qualitative. Whilst I have my doubts about being ‘born’ to do something, which is back to the nature/nurture argument and so forth – I think that the notion of it being ‘vocational’ does have a bit of a influence on how teachers view their work. It also, unfortunately, has implications for how teachers are taken advantage of in the system. Yet I find that there’s a great many who hang on despite all this; perhaps there are common dispositions or personality types that tend towards the teaching profession.

That and the fact that if one can still find a sense of humor after all of this, maybe you’re not doing too bad. Perhaps. I should set fire to a few more papers, just to be sure.

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