The myth of the ‘thick skin’

“As a teacher, I’ve felt like a standup comic with a room full of high energy harassing hecklers”

Here’s a provocative question to kickstart your day: in which job is it a given that employees may routinely expect pranks and derogatory comments during the workday? In which profession can an employee expect to be derided, rejected, insulted, criticised, laughed at, interrupted, undermined, ignored, or antagonised, as a matter of course - as daily practice?

Did ‘clown’ pop into your mind perhaps? That’s often how a teacher feels - and it’s demoralising to say the least.

There is the unspoken expectation that becoming a teacher means taking pupil meanness on the chin. We must never react, never feel angry, never feel hurt. We must respond with humour, tolerance and compassion at all times. We must continue to work with energy, passion, creativity and excellence - even when the climate is characterised by open hostility, where one is either the butt of the joke or the target of rage - or both. Not as a one-off, not as an anomaly. As a presumption.

Mistreatment of teachers has been normalised by the belief that vitriol from children is innocuous.

The narrative is that teachers ought to grow a thick skin and not take things personally. Certainly, we try. Mostly, we succeed. We fortify our self-esteem with overriding commitments to our roles as educators, because of our natural altruism, because of our work-ethic, because we’re the adults in the room, because we have responsibilities to society as a whole. There are few industries that demand the almost absolute negation of personal wellbeing for the greater good.

This post is about laying bare the vulnerabilities of teachers. The fact is: teachers have feelings.

And these feelings are hurt often. Hurt feelings destroy the confidence and enthusiasm needed to bring the curriculum to life, to inspire our lessons. They make us question our purpose in our work, they make us doubt our capabilities and competencies, they make us self-conscious, they make us fearful. In the extreme, they make us depressed.

Mostly, teachers deal very well with what we consider horse-play or age-appropriate antics in the classroom. After all, we are experts in child development, particularly correlated to our teaching and learning area. But there’s a flaying of the skin that happens over time, especially when the nastiness is ratcheted up or compounded by unsympathetic parents.

If we all value education as we say we do, then we must value the educators delivering it. The Teacher Training Lab values educators and education. We can’t have one without the other. When we reframe purposely malicious acts directed at teachers, not as “kids being kids” but as antisocial behaviour in need of interventions, we create professionalism and standards. Schools must be a safe learning environment as well as a safe working environment.