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I realise that teaching is a high stress profession, and without having done it I would guess that it is also a very isolating one. The thing that I notice at the school my kids attend is that the parents expect the teachers to be perfect and solve every problem their child has for them, however the teachers themselves seem to retreat behind the school system and not quite take responsibility for themselves.
I'm guessing that many young male teachers also find it hard when the students challenge their authority to be in control. Unfortunately their own self-doubt gets in the way and they end up feeling stressed and then angry. They probaly then feel more self-doubt as they didn't take up teaching to be angry at their students, instead they did it wanting to help them. My observation of teachers in country towns is that they tend to only socialise among themselves, it's probaly because they find it hard to socialise with parents and friends of their students. Their are two sides to this, one is the expectation of the community for a perfect person to be a teacher and the other is that the teacher is trying to appear to be a authouritarian figure.
This is a recipe for disaster. A depressed person is usually very withdrawn and lost in their own thoughts.
The answer is ultimately that we need each others support, parents need to support the teacher not blame them for every problem and teachers need to be able to ask for help when they need it. A bit of understanding can go along way.
I remember a teacher who rather hated me, early in high school. He taught english and in class discussions about books I always managed to express opinions about people which were very negative and I no longer believe. The reason I believed these things was because I was depressed, anxious, suicidal and had post traumatic stress disorder, however I was/am very good at not letting it show. I can see now that he was angry at me because my opinions challenged his own and his authority within the classroom, however his anger only served to reinforce my beliefs that everyone around me was awful/hateful etc (I thought the novel 1984 was a perfect sumation of human character).
I see interactions similar to this being played out all around me in my nation, I only wish that people could show each other a little more compassion. Aussies pull together in the worst of times and find strength to face terrible things in each other (it's why we remember the war years so often) and afterwards we have a laugh together. I only wish we could do it all the time.
I'm a person who has had my inner voice end up at I DESERVE TO DIE on continuous loop, and I am lucky to have survived it and will never look down upon anyone else who is struggling to cope. I am reasonably unusual in that I have suffered from these mental illnesses but am also able to understand them at an intellectual level, it gives me an unusual perspective.
The last thing that I can say is that we experience stress when we are afraid, we are very uncomfortable with expressing fear in our society. Instead of expressing fear we use the stress to generate anger and ultimately we come to hate the thing that we are afraid of. The way I have gotten better is to accept that I was afraid, to allow myself to feel my fears and face them. Most of them were unrealistic and only existed in my mind.
I hope all of this isn't way to much information for anyone, and that maybe it might help someone.
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) all day and it just erupted at Lunch. Me, Badger and some other mates were playing Rugby on the opposite field to where it broke out
Originally Posted by Burgs
But what was that Shakespeare said?
