Last week a wave of new teachers arrived at schools, recruited in desperation to simulate that the government has an almost magical solution to a time bomb set up over the last 15-20 years and thus ensure that students are taking classes. There are those who arrive like this, literally with “zero km” of teaching experience reminding me of other times, from the 70s to the 80s of the 20th century when something similar happened, initially using students from the so-called Propedeutic Education and then recent graduates or, like me, finalists of university courses to make up for more or less temporary needs.
Just like then, they arrive at schools, fresh, still fresh, without knowing whether to stay or to see it as a job, without any type of “professionalization”, something that tempers certain very purist sensibilities of their “pedagogical training”, which is not mine, especially because, as I wrote, I went through something similar, as a student and a novice teacher. Although as a student, truth be told, I learned little of relevance in classes taught by those who were in the equivalent of our 12th year and with very little to teach.
There are, however, important differences between what happened, especially in the 80s, and what is happening now.
The first is that when I started teaching my first classes, the “craft” was basically the same as what I had observed from my teachers. What I did didn’t differ much from what I had seen done, because it was obvious. You grabbed your time book, went to class and tried to teach the possible to those who wanted it and the impossible to those who were there just to ruin the scene. With this or that variation of style or materials, almost everything was in sight. This is not the case now and even those who were secondary school students a couple of years ago are unaware of the enormous workload (often useless, often redundant) behind the scenes that is now required of teachers. And this is noticeable when these new colleagues come across everything that their older colleagues have to convey to them in accelerated mode. And one quickly notices the astonishment and discouragement that it took us (the “old people”) a few years to sink in, after an intense and inglorious fight.
The second difference, more noticeable from the second half of the 1980s, is that sufficient housing required 12 seats per year to enter a classroom (with a couple of exceptions), which would be equivalent to 144 ECTS today. People arrived at the classroom already with some knowledge and this helped to control the insecurity of being young and having no or little experience. “Professionalization” was not essential. It was important to arrive with more than a vague idea of most of what you were going to try to teach. Because it’s one thing to arrive with zero km, it’s another to be unaware of the layout and condition of the road surface to be covered.
Basic Education Teacher. Write without applying the new Spelling Agreement