Surviving Time

 

 

 

During one University vacation, I was in my parents’ house and debating what to do about getting some extra cash.  In talking with my parents, I said that other students had suggested going to the Labour Exchange, (Job Centre) failing to find a job and then claiming some sort of social security money.  My father said that was tantamount to theft.  If there was a job I should take it and not try and “work the system”.

     So, off I went for the first time in my life and entered a Labour Exchange.  I cannot pretend that my reception was anything less than frosty, but one question they asked was revealing, “Do you actually want a job?”  Which suggested that they usually processed vacationing students with the minimum of delay, assuming all students were workshy and looking for a handout!  I protested that I did actually want a job.  They said that they would let me know.

     By the time that I got home, the Labour Exchange had phoned up, and my father told me that I would be working in a bakery, and that my shift started at 10 pm that night! 

     I had never previously worked in a bakery or in any sort of factory, and I had never done a night shift.  It was a baptism of fire.

     I was put on a bread production line, and I did the sort of mechanical job that one assumed would be better done by a machine: I picked up pre-cut slabs of dough and put them in tins.  That was it.  After a couple of minutes instruction, I was doing the ‘job’ as competently as someone who had worked there for twenty years.  It was intensely boring, but you couldn’t lose concentration because the convey belt production of dough was inexorable and you had to dela with it.

     The best part of my shift was towards the end of it (surprise!) when instead of dolloping dough I helped stack the bread tins and was able to talk to a young under-manager.  This was the highpoint of my work and the time I looked forward to!  Which is sad on a number of levels.

     However, we are taking of the days when low paid jobs were numerous and it was possible to leave one and go into another with no real fear of being jobless for an extended period of time – even for we students who were only looking for a few weeks’ employment.

     Because we were there for a relatively short time, it did mean that you could stand just about anything because you knew it was time limited: This Too Will Pass, was the every ready motto to keep frustrated students focussed on the pay-packet, and not the intellectual worth of what they were doing to get it.

     Only one vacation job was impossible to continue, and if I tell you that the most interesting and satisfying element of this open-office vicious tedium-inducing torture was going through thousands of receipts and taking out all the ones with a small asterisk in the right corner, it will perhaps give you a sense of the bone-crushing awfulness of the work.

     I can’t say that I enjoyed any of my vacation jobs, though there were sometimes episodes or moments that were good, and, after all, all experience is valuable – even if it’s negative.

     The job that paid the best (with paid overtime as well!) was when I was employed as a platelayer on the internal railway inside East Moors Steel Works, in Cardiff.  A job, I might add, for which I was almost entire unfitted, but did my best.

     This job came back to me because we are now in the early days of September and I have been watching the return of teachers who troop through the café next to the swimming pool to get their coffees before turning the corner and walking towards the school where they teach.

     It is the start of a new school year and there a spring in their steps and an unalloyed enthusiasm as they greet colleagues that they have not seen for the duration of the summer holidays, that will barely last a day before the reality of the hard slog to Christmas forces itself on the consciousness.

     There has been much talk in the news about the retirement age and how the number of years before a full pension is awarded seem to be creeping upward.  Figures like 65 – 66 – 67 are quoted before a pension is paid!  Being a classroom teacher until you are 67 or older!  That is tantamount to a death sentence!

     As has been said, “Teaching has the peculiar problem that the pupils stubbornly remain the same age while the teacher doesn’t.”  Raising pension ages makes actuarial sense when people live longer, but it doesn’t follow that every occupation remains equally sustainable at 65-67.

     The trouble with teaching is that classroom teaching is classroom teaching, with all the stresses and strains that dealing with large classes bring.  There is no real shortcut to being a professional teacher.

     But, it seems to me that making a teacher work until the age of 67 or, God forbid, even older is not fair either on the teacher, nor on the pupils.

    What are the possibilities for teachers outside the classroom?  Administration is allowed for with an extra allocation of free periods within a teaching timetable.  Pastoral Care, being a head of year or similar, again there may be more free periods, but most heads of year also have a teaching timetable as well.  Senior Management Team – apart from the headteacher, most have a teaching timetable.

     So, if you are a subject teacher, and you want to survive until you reach retirement age and enjoy some sort of life after the magic date, what can you do?  Your options are limited and there is no clear progression from a demanding teaching timetable in the classroom to something that allows you to remain in the profession but to thrive and develop outside the classroom.

     Back to my plate laying days in the steel works.  There was one guy who was well advanced in years, but he was still part of the team that laid track, transported it, used drills and hammers to do hard physical work, but there was an understanding that he would not be asked to do certain things and some of his duties involved oiling the points in the rails that meant that he carried a pot of oil and a long brush and make sure that things were lubricated properly.  From time to time, he did do physical work, but I noted that he used the minimum amount of effort in a masterclass of conservation of energy, in stark comparison to the younger and their more gung-ho physicality.  He bobbed along, playing his part, but not doing the hardest of graft, but justifying his position.

     In teaching we need the equivalent of “oiling the points” so that older colleagues can survive and thrive.