Say “teacher” and a clear image forms in people\'s minds, which is not surprising in view of the years we all spent contemplating the reality. More surprising is the variety of bizarre forms this image takes. People used to think that teachers, if female, were intense persistent creatures, and if male, were a little strange. They would refer to teachers they knew and proceed to generalizations, most frequently concerning their quarrelsome, emotional way of discussing things, their dictatorial or pedantic tendencies and, above all, their boring inability to talk about anything other than their jobs.
Teachers themselves are prone to a particularly self-conscious view of their role. Outside their working place, they tend to feel isolated and to grow away from friends, who work a standard office day, in much the same way as doctors and social workers do. Inside the life of a school, their anxiety can be seen in different ways. One of the more chilling is staffroom paranoia - the phenomenon whereby everyone sits stiffly around the room, working in silence, or gossiping about the children, or chatting about other things, but never daring to talk with candor about their mistakes and experiments in class, or their real feelings about teaching.
Apparently unaffected by this reticence there are the teachers who talk tirelessly about their jobs in response to any encouragement. They, too, are reacting to the same stresses, but in a different way.
This highlights what seems to be an under-emphasized side of the teaching life, namely that the job imposes exceptional stresses and conflicts, and that these have the power to isolate teachers from everybody else, to alter their outlook and even their characters.
Monday Morning is a good example of the differences between school and office. In many offices you can arrive a little late, whatever is not important can be put off, and with luck you can have an extended lunch-hour.
A teacher\'s Monday is more likely to begin on Sunday night, when the first uneasiness creeps up behind. There are preparations to be made for the morning, and even if they have been made it is difficult to shake off a sense of guilt about the quantity and quality of the preparations, or vague resentment over the erosion of free time. From the moment of arrival at school there is no place for lethargy: children are all around, full of questions and bounce.
The same worry can spill over into evenings and weekends. Young teachers who have had college lectures on \"discipline in the classroom situation\" or \'the deprived child\" are not properly warned of the emotional impact children can make on them. They sit and brood about the children\'s needs, and always feel that they could be doing more. Of course that\'s true, but the best teachers are the ones who can switch off, by doing whatever work is necessary, and then refusing to let it encroach further on their life.
But the stress of responsibility remains, and it leads to a proliferations of minor ailments. In an ordinary job such complaints are trivial, and quickly dealt with by a day in bed, if they become irritating. In school they ruin things for everybody. Knowing the difficulties that absence creates in school, with the class being split up and loaded on to colleagues or else being minded by supply staff, teachers are notoriously hypochondriacal. Yet they don\'t stay home when they should, and often totter back to school before they\'re fully recovered, propelled by anxiety. Thus the cycle continues, and under circumstances like these the most reasonable person can be petty and childish - answering back, trying to hurt.
It is this kind of intensity that makes teaching so extraordinary. Extremes of behavior are more common in the classroom than people would believe. Many teachers discover in themselves depths of bad temper, even rage, they never knew they had.
What a contrast it is to wake up without a nervous jolt, to feel the number of your responsibilities to mankind diminished by approximately 33, and to be free to enjoy your mental and physical space. There is no going back, though: the rewards of the job are so special that teachers learn to maintain high expectations, and apply them generally. The experiences they have in school have a great influence on their attitudes to jobs and people. Most of the generalizations about them are rooted somewhere in truth -teachers are different - but few people bother to find out why.
Helen Rogan Adapted from \"The Times\"
