Labour Ministers

[osarusan]

Soon after I finished university, I was contacted by an old housemate, who had studied economics (or finance, or accounting). He had got a job somewhere as a substitute teacher despite having no qualifications whatsoever. He was teaching book-keeping up to leaving cert level, even though he told me he wasn't confident he'd get an A in it himself, never mind teaching others to an A standard. He was also teaching other classes in first and second year - I vividly remember getting a text from him asking what the 'tone of of a poem' meant.

[Eminence Grise]

Ruair Quinn has just announced plans to reduce the number of Junior Cert exam subjects to a maximum of 8, with more to be given to focussing on reading and maths. It won't take effect immediately, but will be in place by 2014. It's a start...

[Mr A]

I taught in a secondary for a year despite being unqualified. At the time (about 8 years ago) there was a desperate shortage of trained teachers, especially in the likes of physics.

A year later and the level of applications went through the roof. I don't have a lot of sympathy for those who feel that just because they're trained they're automatically entitled to jobs.

The teacher who had taken physics the year before was qualified, but completely and utterly crap. The leaving cert class didn't even have text books, only about three of them had any notes and she had been as such a soft touch that all the muppets had picked the subject. Nightmare stuff. Virtually all passed in the end by some miracle.

It was also scary how few of the students had any capacity for independent thought. Most of the other subjects were all about spoon feeding.

Also, students suffered from the attitudes of their parents in that maths was seen as difficult, a bit pointless and something that it was perfectly acceptable to be crap at.

Pretty depressing, if interesting experience.