Hi there. In this education post I talk about the existence of teachers not wanting to teach. This sounds awful but it does exist in different ways.
The main motivation behind this post was based from my private education work. One of my student clients did not want to teach basic computer programming for a grade 9 math exam from the provincial government. The Ontario government recently changed the math curriculum around 2021 or 2022 and have included some computer programming and personal finance concepts. The programming concepts included if statements, while loops and basic input/output concepts. These are basic concepts in programming but for those are new, the concepts are not that easy.
The problem with this new curriculum change is that the teachers were not really provided support on teaching these new concepts. Our provincial government was pretty much telling teachers to teach the new stuff without resources. Many math teachers in grade 9 have not taken programming so they would have to learn it in order to teach it. With my student client, her teacher did not seem to want to teach programming concepts for the exam. There was some excuse of "Umm, programming is hard so we are not doing it." To me this is a cop out. It is kind of crazy to not teach something that is on an upcoming exam.
I can't speak for all teachers but I am sure that students with poor behaviours get in the way of teaching. Something is wrong when teachers have to spend more time getting students to behave than taking the time to teach. You could get extreme cases of students being violent.
If the environment for teachers is very poor, teachers could ask themselves "What am I here for?" or "Is this worth it?". This could apply to either public schools, private schools or at learning centers. One option is to ask administrators for assistance. If the higher-ups are not taking action to resolve issues then it would be best for the teacher(s) to leave for another school. There are cases it could be really bad where the teacher may decide to quit the profession.
Money does matter when it comes to work. Teachers want to be paid for their expertise, time and money spent in school and for their abilities. Many teachers do not want to work for free.
If the compensation, pay, working hours are not great then teachers may want to work elsewhere. Different teachers will have different views on what is good pay and what are good working environments. Some teachers live near the schools they work at while other teachers may have to travel far. Teachers would have to examine their own effort to reward ratios to determine if their work is being compensated well with pay and work environment.
Teachers who feel that they are underpaid could look for other schools that either pay more, have more working hours and/or have more behaved students. In some places the teaching industry may not offer high pay. Education may not be a high priority in some places so teachers are underpaid. Low pay can drive good teachers out of the profession.
Thank you for reading.
