teachers suffering stress

[dogsbody70]

No. of teachers suffering stress hits highest level in 2009

[RealJames]

that doesn't surprise me much, teachers here have it so badly ...

check out stuff about "Monster Parents"

[dogsbody70]

goodness James .

what set all this off Iwonder?

Japan's 'monster' parents take centre stage - Times Online


AFP: 'Monster parents' plague Japan's schools


From Ky

[seiki]

All I can say is wow. And that I had heard about them being crazy over things like grades test scores and whatnot but Damn. Could someone explain why realjames' article blamed it on economic depression from 1990?

[Nyororin]

First...
The commonly passed around story of the school play where all the boys were the hero or all the girls the heroine has been looked into extensively and dismissed as an urban legend.
A lot of the "monster parent" tales made famous online and in tabloid media are fabrications - in any case that didn`t end up with outsider involvement (lawyers or police for example) it is down to hearsay. In other words, anyone can make up a "this really happened where I worked!" story and have it be published, of course with all names removed to protect privacy.

A good example - our local elementary school has a story about a monster parent demanding that the school provide breakfasts for parents in the morning.
The true story - the school offered up a plan to have children come to school 30 minutes earlier and be given a breakfast every morning.
A number of parents protested along the lines of "Morning is our family`s together time, and some days the only quality time spent with a late-working parent. If you want them to HAVE to come to school 30 minutes earlier and eat breakfast there, then offer breakfast for parents too. Otherwise, make it optional!"

Sounds a lot more reasonable when in context. The bit published in the local newspaper? "Parents demand breakfast from school!"

The reality though... There are a few parents who are overly active in their child`s education. But there are a lot more who are justifiably active.

In the past, if there was an unpleasant event at school - say, for example, a teacher got mad and hit a student hard enough to cause a black eye - the school would apologize (maybe), and then the parents would be basically forced to keep quiet about it or risk their own child being dismissed for ruining the school image. Not to mention that teachers fell into the same category as doctors... They were authority figures who just weren`t questioned.
There is now more power in the hands of - or at least more courage and community support behind - the parents. If a teacher causes numerous problems and the school will not take action, parents tend to band together to force some kind of a solution.

A lot of this change came about through Yutori - the complete mess of an education system that they`re finally trying to fix. The system made it very hard for teachers to teach well if they weren`t extremely good teachers. Where in the past there would be 30 minutes of curriculum for every 50 minute class, when Yutori came along that fell to between 5 and 10 minutes for each class. 20 minutes for questions and teacher-specific activities is a lot easier for a teacher than 45. The good teachers, alright teachers, and poor teachers became very clear to parental eyes. Instead of entrusting a child to the school, parents found that if they were unlucky enough to be stuck with an average or below teacher they needed to be very proactive to keep their child from losing opportunities that a less talented child with an excellent teacher might have. Parents who aren`t proactive and who don`t push tend to be dropped to the back, so even when it wouldn`t seem necessary for parents to push they feel they have to or their child will be forgotten because all the other parents are pushing.

The biggest reason that there is an issue now with stress is that they`re trying to fix Yutori. In other words, trying to get a bunch of children who for their entire school lives have been in classes where there was virtually no pressure, no grades (yes, Yutori removed the grading system for elementary schools - you just got to know the rank in the classroom and grade level), and very little structure back into a structured and productive studying pattern. That is an enormous amount of pressure for a teacher, especially in the higher grades. It is pressure from the school board to hurry and clean up the mess, it is pressure from parents who blame the schools and teachers for the mess, and pressure from society that blames a lot of the current issues on the mess.

[TalnSG]

That shift explains alot of the cause. Even without turning the classroom agenda upside down, the culture shift in the U.S. over the last 40+ years has changed the teaching enormously, increasing the pressure steadily. But in the U.S. it has been a steady decline in student discipline because of an overly litigious society that has created the most stress here, not the pressure to produce.