Wang Ruoran did not expect that his teaching career was only 10 days, and he had to press the end button in a hurry because his body could not bear it and his spirit became more and more nervous.
I always thought that I was fragile and didn't have enough capacity to bear it", until she saw her colleague "collapsed" as soon as she saw it, and heard the old teacher advise her to leave quickly, "I will only get more and more tired in the future", she suddenly realized that the teachers were facing a collective dilemma.
Nowadays, this most important group in education is enduring a lot of trivial work outside of teaching for a long time, surrounded by formalism, bearing mental pressure from many sides, and even having 1 3 hours to teach is already a luxury.
A teacher who is busy from morning to night
It took Wang Ruoran nearly an hour to finish the 10-day experience.
After graduating from a normal college, Wang Ruoran joined a junior high school in Hunan Province in September this year. At noon the day before the start of school, the leader temporarily notified her to be the head teacher. She and another female teacher, who was even thinner, were called to school again. In one afternoon, the two of them brought 1,500 books from the library to the classroom, "like a kindergarten child", one by one to the seats, tied the books with streamers, and blew a balloon for each person.
Every day after that, Wang Ruoran's daily routine was: arriving at school at 7:30 in the morning, and starting at 7:40, he called every parent of a late student to ask why the child did not come. At lunchtime, stand outside the classroom and wait for the students to line up and go to the designated place in the cafeteria to eat, "This is also to be included in the assessment".
After putting the students on the bus in the afternoon, she didn't have time to eat dinner, so she went to a meeting to record every word the leader said at the meeting, so that she could repeat it in the class the next day.
After returning home at 8 p.m., she opened WeChat and asked parents to ask whether their children had arrived home, "and if anyone doesn't reply, they have to ask immediately." After dinner, she began to change the "various **" from the school work group ** to the parent group, urging parents to fill in, collect information and summarize, mother and daughter to help together, mother and daughter were busy until 11 o'clock. Day after day. Within a few days, Wang Ruoran, who was already only 80 pounds, lost 5 pounds.
The school requires each teacher to complete home visits to each student throughout the semester, "counting the average I have to go to two students' homes a week, and I can't rest at all on weekends." The non-stop busyness made Wang Ruoran feel unbearable pain, "I have a headache when I see WeChat", she began to hide WeChat on the last page of the mobile phone desktop, and chatted with friends by Weibo private messages. The leader's office is only one floor away from Wang Ruoran's class, but during working hours, she is "so busy that she never has time to climb this floor, and she can only tell the leader through WeChat at night when she resigns, I really can't be a leader."
Many teachers have similar experiences to Wang Ruoran, and their work and life are filled with a lot of non-teaching tasks. Teaching and educating people seems to have become the most important thing for teachers. According to the incomplete statistics of this magazine, the tasks of teachers include:
Fill out forms, all kinds of forms;
Voting, Li Ying, the grade director of a junior high school in Shenzhen, organized parents to vote three times in three days, which were to support a certain program of the education union, the election of the annual teacher of the trade union, and the fire propaganda, "It has nothing to do with the school Xi, there are as many as cows", if the number of votes does not meet the standard, the head teacher will also be responsible;
Solitaire, everything has to be done by parents, students come home at night to have Solitaire, receive a notice Solitaire, and have voted to Solitaire;
In recent years, primary and secondary schools have become popular for teachers to manage traces, requiring everything to be traced. Li Ying said that her mobile phone ** was full of screenshots, and the computer files were full of class meetings**, and as soon as the computer was turned on, the students even subconsciously asked: "Teacher, do you want to take pictures?".Yang Yuhan, a high school teacher in Heilongjiang, also gave an example, the school just held a meeting to inform that if the class finds that the phenomenon of male and female students interacting, the class teacher must record the conversation with them word by word, "so that when there is a record in the future, the parents will be speechless";In addition, there are endless tasks such as holding meetings, brushing lessons, handwriting lesson plans, and helping the school farm the land.
Many teachers said that the worst configuration is the class teacher + Chinese teacher, in addition to completing the above tasks, the Chinese teacher is often defaulted to strong writing ability, and has to undertake many additional tasks of writing materials. Yang Yuhan counted the materials he had written in the past year of work: countless WeChat pushes, the principal's speech, a letter from the school to all teachers during the epidemic period, and a ...... of the school celebration achievement display book"As long as it involves text, they will look for you, and any director can add you to WeChat at any time and send you an urgent job. ”
Of course, other teachers are not having a good time, and some **, psychology teachers are arranged to handle administrative work. Wang Ruoran mentioned that he had a friend who was a physical education teacher, and after being arranged as a "sports leader", he took demonstration classes and held meetings, and moved his office from the stadium to the computer, "busy from morning to night every day".
Unhappy teacher,
You can't teach happy children
Almost every teacher emphasizes that teaching students is the easiest and happiest thing nowadays, but preparing and teaching can only be done by "squeezing time".
Before officially joining the company, Yang Yuhan had been Xi in her current high school for a few months, and she recalled that at that time, the daily tasks were very simple, only to listen to lectures and correct homework. She often spends the whole day looking at textbooks and reference materials, and then searching for the content related to the teaching content** to improve her curriculum as much as possible. Yang Yuhan loves reading, believes in idealism, and believes that Chinese classes "should not be too utilitarian", and if students can like a poet, a certain work, and fall in love with literature because of a class, "this is the meaning of Chinese teaching".
But after really becoming a teacher, she found that she "had no time to prepare for classes during the day", and she was always busy until 12 o'clock at night, and she didn't have enough sleep time, so she had to find PPT lesson plans directly on the Internet to "teach according to the book".
On the first day of the class, after talking about the PPT arranged by the school, Wang Ruoran told the students about the connection between the ancient names and characters, "Zhou Yu's character Gongjin, 'Yu and Jin' are all next to the jade character, representing his parents' expectations for his high quality." To Wang Ruoran's surprise, the originally "lifeless" class suddenly became active, and the students actively spoke and took the initiative to share their favorite poets with her, and the distance between them and the students was instantly shortened.
Recalling the picture of that day, Wang Ruoran's tone still can't hide her excitement, at that moment, she had a firm determination to be a good teacher, but the reality made her unbearable after all.
On the day she learned that she could leave her job, Wang Ruoran did not tell the students, and when she heard the sound of their writing, she secretly wiped her tears. When the students left after school, she repeatedly returned to the classroom to tidy up her belongings, "always wondering if I still had something to take", only to realize later that she was reluctant to leave.
Li Ying sighed that according to the percentage, it is already a luxury for teachers to have 1 3 time to teach. Many teachers have the desire to improve themselves and teach and educate people, but in fact there is a big gap, which adds to the psychological pressure of teachers.
The day before the interview, Li Ying had just finished comforting a teacher who had an emotional breakdown. The school arranged for her to produce the test papers for the mid-term exam, and at the same time to rehearse the phalanx of the sports meeting, "there was a lot of work", but there was a small mistake in the test paper, and the leader criticized her and asked her to write it for inspection immediately.
Li Ying counted. In the two years since she became the head of grade, more than 10 of the 20 new teachers have come to her office to cry, and more than once. The teachers' mental state is generally very poor, "there is no sense of satisfaction", basically no one can leave work at the specified time, even if they are very motivated at the beginning, and when they see each other after a while, their faces are full of exhaustion, and some even quit and leave.
The Institute of Organization and Human Resources of the School of Public Administration of Chinese University has conducted a survey in recent years, and the results show that more than 80% of the teachers surveyed reported high pressure, nearly 30% had serious job burnout, and nearly 40% had poor psychological conditions.
As a charitable organization dedicated to the spiritual growth of teenagers and children in Guangdong Province, the organization initially regarded teachers as an important part of carrying out psychological courses and delivery services, but in the practice of public welfare, it has noticed more and more that teachers are under huge psychological pressure. Since the beginning of this year, Rici has developed offline stress reduction workshops, online courses and other psychological support programs specifically for teachers, and interviewed dozens of teachers in Henan, Hunan and other places. They found that burnout among teachers was generally strong, and "some teachers also suffered from mental illnesses such as depression due to various stressors."
Wang Qiang, the project leader, deals with many teachers every day, and he summarized the common psychological dilemmas of teachers. First, in addition to the pressure of academic assessment, many young teachers look forward to their own growth when they first enter the workplace, but often fall into self-denial because they cannot complete the tasks assigned by the school. The second is that the busy work makes it difficult for them to balance work and family, Li Ying also mentioned that it is difficult for her to find time to accompany her daughter who is still in kindergarten, and when she returns home, she is angry because of work, and sometimes she loses her temper uncontrollably with her daughter, and she is full of indebtedness afterwards.
In addition, teachers are under an invisible pressure at the social level, "the requirements and expectations for teachers in recent years are actually very high", as long as something happens in the school, teachers and schools will be under huge pressure, they can only be cautious and cautious in their work, for fear of stimulating students, parents or superiors.
The fatigue and stress of teachers will be further transmitted to students. They tend to magnify a small thing in class, and they are more likely to lose their temper or act serious because of their students' words and actions. A teacher once shared with Wang Qiang that once she was in a bad state in class, and some students came to ask after class, and after reflection, she chose to apologize to the students in class the next day.
Psychological anxiety also further affects the body. Yang Yuhan was diagnosed with breast nodules for the first time during a physical examination last year, and since she has been working for a year, she has been hit by almost every round of flu. She mentioned that one of her seniors, because of the pressure of staying up late all the year round, the immune system disorder, the platelet value dropped to 1, and almost life-threatening, and he was hospitalized for more than two months before he got better.
Reduce the burden on teachers
What makes teachers feel even more troublesome is that these formalisms are not only within the scope of teaching, but can be assigned tasks by any department, and they have no right to refuse.
In May last year, an article titled "Only the Animal Husbandry Bureau Didn't Assign Tasks to Teachers" swiped the screen in the teachers' circle of friends. The article counts the tasks assigned by the ** department to teachers, including but not limited to anti-fraud, health, comprehensive public opinion surveys, traffic safety publicity, civilized city creation, community health inspection, etc.
Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Education Sciences, and his team have conducted surveys in schools in different regions and found that the workload of grassroots teachers in China is seriously overloaded at this stage. The number of documents issued by the administrative department to primary and secondary schools every year ranges from 700 to 1,700, and many of the documents are layered, and many of them are unrelated to education and teaching.
Under the current school management system, schools are subordinate to the administrative department, and this subordination makes it difficult for many schools to refuse the demands of the administrative department. As a result, the number of documents and directives issued by the administrative department to schools has increased year by year, and almost every department has been able to assign its own work to schools and front-line teachers, resulting in them being overwhelmed. Chu Zhaohui analyzed.
In order to accomplish these tasks, teachers had to become "decathloners" and educate not only students, but also parents. Li Ying mentioned that her school received several reports from the police, parents riding bicycles on the road to send their children without helmets to our care, and even parents were defrauded, ** asked the head teacher to provide screenshots, asking if we did a good job of preaching. This exacerbates the tension between teachers and parents, often teachers are unhappy, parents are even more unhappy, and the authority of teaching is gradually dissolved by all kinds of "messy things".
Li Ying can't figure out why this is the case, she has been teaching for 18 years and has been a class teacher for 10 years. More than a decade ago, the tasks of teachers were still largely out of the framework of education, and they did not have such frequent contact with parents. It seems that everything has changed since the new crown epidemic, the popularization of online teaching has begun to change, everything must be left on the Internet, and the task of formalism is "increasing unabated". I don't know since when "education became a service industry", and anyone could complain about the teacher and assign tasks to the teacher.
In fact, in recent years, the state has been paying attention to reducing the burden on teachers. At the end of 2019, the Office of the CPC Central Committee and the Office of the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Reducing the Burden of Primary and Secondary School Teachers and Further Creating a Good Environment for Education and Teaching", which clearly stated that primary and secondary school teachers should not undertake matters unrelated to education and teaching, including reducing supervision, inspection, evaluation and assessment matters, social affairs into the campus, filling in reports, and transferring and borrowing primary and secondary school teachers. Ensure that the supervision, inspection, evaluation, and assessment items of primary and secondary schools are reduced by more than 50% on the existing basis, and the list of retained items after cleaning up is implemented.
In 2020, the Ministry of Education and other eight departments issued the "Several Opinions on Further Stimulating the Vitality of Primary and Secondary Schools", which proposed to vigorously streamline and strictly regulate all kinds of "entering the campus" special education activities, and effectively eliminate interference with the normal education and teaching order of schools. But the reality is that the burden on teachers is getting heavier and heavier.
Xiong Bingqi, president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, pointed out that why the non-teaching burden of teachers cannot be reduced?This is because it is the administrative department that assigns administrative tasks to teachers that reduces the burden on teachers, which makes the burden reduction fall into a paradox, and it only stays in documents and forms. "To effectively reduce the burden on teachers, we must not rely on documents to reduce the burden, but must reform the management and evaluation system of teachers, and the administrative department will lead the assessment and evaluation of teachers, and turn to the establishment of a professional community of teachers to conduct professional evaluation of teachers. ”
In Chu Zhaohui's view, this situation is caused by the fact that the basic rights of teachers are not guaranteed. In particular, the autonomy of teaching and the autonomy of schools in running schools have not been guaranteed, and modern schools have not been truly established. "The most important thing is to go back to the essence of education. The primary goal of education is to produce the next generation of sound personalities for the country and the nation. No specific matter, no administrative directive, can override this goal. ”
At the request of the interviewee, Wang Ruoran, Yang Yuhan, and Li Ying are pseudonyms in the article).