Comments 1 - 18 of 18 Search these comments
Does social status still matter at a certain age?
The patnet standard is to link to an article, quote a small piece of it, and then write YOUR ideas.
Don't Cut and paste it.
Just my opinion. I am getting tired of scrolling through long copies of someone elses ideas.
Maybe a larger issue is ignoring users, logging out to see what those users posted, and then quoting them. Maybe someone should do a psyche profile of someone who does that.
Stuffing impressionable minds with delusional socialist drivel and directed re-invention of history must be great fun
to become a teacherMy mother (1902-1997) taught from 1924 to 1970 and her generation of teachers, although never highly paid, enjoyed as much respect and indeed status as any judge, lawyer, doctor or other professional person of that era. The entire society, students, parents, the legal system supported teachers in every way and never questioned their authority. They didn't have to worry about mentioning religious concepts in class, specifically Christian or Jewish, whether as a source of moral teaching or as an example of the greatest literature ever written. We had Bible readings followed by prayer over the PA system every morning in homeroom before we went to class and I never heard of anyone being hurt by them. Teachers of that era also never made fools of themselves in public and comported themselves with complete dignity. The sexual relationships with students that seem ubiquitous today would have never occurred to that generation of teachers as they had too much self-respect. And their expertise in their various fields was unquestioned. Lyle Skinner directed band at Waco High School from 1932 to 1965 and is still remembered as the greatest band leader of his generation. Three teachers who died young at the height of their success were Leta Spearman who directed WISD's music education department from 1939 to 1964, from a stroke in 1964; Muriel Eggbrecht, librarian and English teacher at Waco High from 1929 to 1960, from cancer, and Lucille Raley, head of WISD's libraries, in a car crash. The older grads still talk with admiration and fondness of these long ago teachers and that kind of status is priceless. I believe those teachers would always rank highly in any group. One of the most fondly remembered teachers, also from Waco High, was Miss Mattie Bess Coffield who taught speech from 1944 until her untimely death in 1962 from cancer at 48. She was renowned not only in Waco but in Texas among other speech teachers in high schools and colleges and always had a prominent role in any speech conventions. Here's former Governor Ann Richards's memory of her in the late 1940's:
When I quit the Financial Times in 2017 to become a trainee teacher, I knew that my future life would contain less of two things. The first was money — which was a bit frightening even though I had slightly softened the impact by stockpiling whatever cash I could lay my hands on.
The second loss was harder to prepare for. My old job came with an unreasonably high level of status. Over three decades I had become used to being eyed by people at dinner parties with slightly more interest once they discovered I was a columnist at the FT. By contrast, the status of teachers is unreasonably low. In most of the world, they are seen as only a little ahead of police officers and far behind doctors and engineers. Only in a few countries, including China and Indonesia, does society value the people who fill children’s minds as highly as those who fix their bodies. Everywhere else, the sneery old saying still gets wheeled out: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
At one of the first recruitment evenings of Now Teach, the charity I co-founded in 2016 to persuade ageing professionals to retrain as teachers, a 40-something banker stood up and said what was putting him off becoming a teacher was losing stature in the eyes of his colleagues. At the time I shrugged and told him to stop minding. I’d gone post-status and I advised him to do the same.
Yet the week I started teaching something odd happened. I was cycling along a London street feeling incompetent and out of control in my new job when I was flagged down by a stranger. What you are doing is so important, he said. Congratulations.
I told him it was too early for that. Congratulations would only be in order when I’d learnt how to be a good teacher and stuck at it for five years.
From the start, undeserved congratulations continued to roll in, and people seemed both interested and admiring of what I was up to. If status is what the Cambridge dictionary says it is — “the amount of respect, admiration or importance given to a person” — it was beginning to look like my status as a feeble novice teacher was higher than it was as a competent experienced columnist.
One of my fellow trainees reported something similar. Anne Marie Lawlor, a former top civil servant turned language teacher, noticed early on that people she met socially seemed far more interested in hearing about her new job than they ever were about her old one.
Given that the low status of teachers is one of the reasons they are in such dangerously short supply, this glimpse of high status struck me as worth investigating. I set about polling all the Now Teach trainees — the 45 who trained with me in 2017 and the 75 who started last September — to see if they had experienced it too.
First I asked them if people they met socially found them more interesting. Some replied that they were too weary as trainee teachers to do any socialising. But almost two-thirds reported that people were keener on talking to them than they used to be. This may not be that surprising, as almost everyone is interested in education, and absolutely everyone enjoys a story from the front line. A misbehaving child makes a better anecdote than minutes of a board meeting.
Only one trainee — who used to be a political journalist — said her social worth had dropped as her former friends and colleagues were only interested in the latest Westminster gossip and she no longer had any to offer.
I then asked the group what becoming a teacher had done to their status in the eyes of others. Most used to do jobs that society values (and pays) highly — they were investment bankers, corporate lawyers, consultants, civil servants, film makers and doctors — and most were towards the top of their respective trees. Now all are at the bottom of a less prestigious tree.
Despite all this, only 6 per cent said their status had fallen and about 65 per cent thought it had gone up since becoming teachers.
It would be nice to conclude that the status of teaching is not so grievously low after all, but I suspect the true explanation is otherwise. Becoming a teacher in your 50s, especially when you’ve had a certain amount of success doing something else, seems to be quite different from becoming one in your 20s.
Jonathan Shaw, a former marketing executive, says the reason is all about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — at the top of which sits some sort of self-actualisation.
“I think lots of us as we get older start to question whether our lives have been well spent,” he says. “Teaching brings a different status and one that’s more relevant to a 50-year-old me than a 25-year-old me.”
Lara Agnew, a former documentary maker who now teaches English, thinks age had changed her idea of what status means.
“I think when we are young we imagine status comes from the outside. The approval, the promotion, the competition — all account for a ‘rise’, as it were, as viewed from the outside.“
Now I am ancient, I realise that my ideas about status come much more from the inside. My own ideas about my contribution, my worth, are what count as status.
”So if the point about status is that we generate it ourselves as we get older, how do the Now Teachers feel about themselves? Has their self-worth gone up as a result of becoming a teacher? In my survey, 62 per cent claimed that it had.
This is remarkable given how difficult and exhausting teaching is, particularly in the first year. One of the 13 per cent who reported a drop in self-worth explained: “It is hard to feel good about yourself when you feel quite so overwhelmed and have no idea what you’re doing.”
But the others insisted they felt better about themselves by virtue of feeling useful. One described the delight he felt when a Year 8 class revealed he was preferred to their previous teacher. “No title or promotion in my old job has ever made me feel this useful and successful,” he said.
Teaching has been good for my own self-worth, though for a different reason. For the first time in my professional life, I don’t think about myself at all. Journalism was partly about me, while teaching is about the children. Even on days when I have given muddled lessons and have not noticeably changed the life of a single child I still go home feeling less out of sorts than after a bad day in the office.
There is a slight irony about this unlooked-for rise in status. I suspect that most of us stopped worrying about our professional status some time ago. I wish I had thought to add a final question to put to the group: how much does status still matter to you? My guess is that most would have answered: not much.
How does it feel to change career? Higher status comes at a price — all of the new teachers are finding their new job somewhere between challenging and bone-crushingly hard. When asked to cite the worst thing about it, they variously replied:
“Feeling hopelessly inadequate”; “bad behaviour of students,” “marking”, “no time to yourself,” “playground duty” and “admin (endless)”.
Yet despite this, few had regrets and almost none were engaging in nostalgia over their previous professional lives.
Nearly half say they never miss their old jobs and a further 35 per cent only felt a pang once a month.
So what was keeping them going? Most of them said the main reason was the students. Here are some of their replies:
“The kids (even the naughty ones).”
“The ‘aha’ moments, when students get it.”
“Becoming a student again.”
"Teaching is never boring.”
“Kids saying, ‘Thank you sir, I get that now!’”
“Having a mother almost in tears at a parents’ evening because she is so grateful that I have managed to set up numeracy support for her boy.”
“Realising that things can improve: kids can learn and so can I.”
Doing maths again.”
“Knowing that every little thing does make a difference, even when you don’t think it has.”
https://www.ft.com/content/d936d5ba-39c7-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0
#SocialStatus #CareerChange #Teaching #Psychology