Striking teacher having second thoughts a month into the job

Unsure what to put on her placard and only a month into the job, Melville Intermediate School teacher Charlotte Gilligan, 22, resorted to broken rulers she had bought. She stuck them to a piece of pink A3 paper she had bought, with glue she had bought, all so she could protest the reality of teaching with a qualification she, too, had bought.

A theme was clear, much of the teaching Gilligan’s 27 year 7-8 students received was paid for out of her pocket.

Alongside student loan repayments and a wage that is only several dollars above the national minimum, Gilligan, whose before tax wage is $51,358.00, was having second thoughts about the profession, she said on Thursday.

“Either you pay for it yourself or out of your classroom budget.”

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Striking for improved pay and conditions, Gilligan joined about 200 other teachers and support staff in Garden Place in Hamilton, alongside scores around the country, to protest the government’s most recent offer.

When asked if that meant forgoing things such as petrol or groceries, Gilligan said: “I guess, yeah.”

She described her entry into the career as a trial by fire.

“The first week was OK because I had those rose-tinted glasses on, but as the kids and I got comfortable the more I kind of realised how hard it can be … It’s definitely a hard job.

“You don’t know until you’re in there experiencing how hard it is to set up your own classroom and trying to manage 27 different behaviours.”

The modern learning environments in place at many schools, where students study and learn in a single larger space under the guidance of several teachers, is also a reason teachers have ended up shouldering more of the burdens associated with higher needs students. Her colleague Arista de Beer, a teacher at Peachgrove Intermediate School, with whom she attended university, explained the scenarios they face.

“In a collaborative classroom there are 50 kids. About 25% of them are high needs… The fact is we don’t have enough learning support or teacher aides in our classrooms, and we have some students that need a teacher aide with them every single day.

“Some of [the teacher aides] only work up until 12pm, and so the whole afternoon we have to try and balance the other 75% and manage the other 25%. It’s not okay!”

De Beer went on to tell how the lack of learning support corresponded directly to the amount of funding each student had allocated to them by the government.

“It’s not enough sometimes. I’ve got a teacher aid in the morning and a teacher aide in the afternoon because that’s the funding some of my kids have, but that middle block I’m kind of on my own, and you can feel the pressure in that middle block sometimes.”

Gilligan remained sanguine despite the challenges. She described teaching as less of a job and more of a calling.

“It’s hard, but I know it’s where I want to be. I know I want to make a difference and I know this is one of the best places I can make the difference I want to make. It’s going to take a lot of work.”

De Beer told of her family’s migration to New Zealand and how a desire to contribute to the future of the country spurred her on.

“We migrated here from South Africa. I love this country and I want to teach future generations of this country.”

Fellow Melville teacher Cara Mackenzie, said that if a pay offer could be secured, it might gird against a potential National-led government that could be hostile to their concerns.

“I think the Labour Party had to clear up the mess of the National Party, national standards and things like that, and that’s taken a long time. So now all this hard work we’re doing, the fear is, National will get elected back in, and they’ll take away all the hard work, or we won’t get the funding, they’ll take the funding off us.”