The Teacher's Role and the Stresses

When we looked at the stresses to which the pupils are exposed, we concentrated mainly on the classroom situation as the setting in which most children spend most of their time in most schools. With the arrival of team-teaching, teaching aids such as teaching -machines and television and with an increasingly complicated tutorial system in secondary schools, the situation is likely to shifty. At present, however, most children are still taught in classroom situations.
Teachers also spend a large part of their working life in classrooms. Yet the teacher's stresses in the classroom cannot be understood unless other aspects of the teacher's professional life are taken into account. In this chapter I propose to examine the pressures on the teacher in the classroom as well as in relationship to other aspects of his life in school.

The teacher's role has been scrutinized by many writers. Morris (1972) for instance points to stresses on the teacher arising from poor pay and from being exclusively in contact with immature minds. Hoyle (1969) refers to the teacher's growing insecurity arising from modern society's uncertainty about basic values, while Wilson (1962) discusses the lack of a clear job definition which makes a teacher's position extremely difficult.

It can, for instance, be argued that apart from examination result, there are no tangible criteria on which a teacher's work can be judged. If a child is happy at school, if he is successful in his work, interested in his lessons and enjoying many out-of-school activities, by what criteria can this be linked to the excellence of the teaching? To what extent might the success be due to the child's personality or to the influences at home? Alternatively, if the child fails at school, if he does not get on with his teachers and his peers, if he prefers to stay at home, to what extent is the teacher to blame, to what extent is the failure due to lack of ability or immaturity of the child, or problems at home? In general, 'good' schools seem to have more successful pupils,. However, they also attract more children from more adequate homes, and the evidence from systematic studies suggests that children's success or failure at school are very closely linked to parental attitudes and that children can be severely handicapped at school by lack of educational opportunities in the home during the early years of a child's life. This insecurity inevitable increases any stresses that a teacher experiences in his work.

Most important of all, it leads to reluctance to share his problems with other people, because the teacher himself finds it difficult to judge to what extent these problems may be due to his own inefficiency. It is not at all easy to find the right balance between blaming oneself for everything that goes wrong and assuming that the fault can always be found in the child or in the home.