Term end

The last couple of weeks have been fairly horrendous and I can't say that I am particularly well motivated to teach at the moment. A truly amazingly complicated and 'petty' system of writing reports (I had over 50 to do) completely dominates life for teachers for the last few weeks of term.

I am amazed that we (teachers) allow ourselves to be dominated by a bureaucratic process that insists on the most inefficient and error prone option - individual reports for each student, in each subject. It is impossible to control style or layout and it is very difficult to tell if a report is missing or not - a teacher may simply have mis-titled the form tutor's name.

Although I'm tired and wouldn't make any important decisions due to that fact, this is a big enough issue to make me consider leaving the post. Which is crazy. I just want to teach! And part of teaching has to be effective feedback to the student, which seems to have been completely forgotten in the process.

Herzberg would certainly identify this as a 'hygiene' factor - unless administration is good it can only de-motivate. I have enough to do over the Christmas break, but I will draft a new work flow for reports that better meets the needs of students and teachers. I am just not doing my job properly if I don't.