Miss, the period's over, it's time for the next class." The class of 25 teenagers began to move en masse towards the door as I gripped the knob firmly, determined to keep them on the inside until the bell rang.

"Miss, he hit me!"

"Miss, we've already done that bit."

"Miss . . ."

Three months of supply teaching in my own former high school in Canada gave me a permanent respect for the job of teaching which makes me impatient with the tired old criticisms that are hurled whenever a row like the current one over teacher pay erupts.

Until you're standing in front of a group of 20 to 35 children or teenagers, you don't realise that being on stage, having to perform, having to attempt to engage the attention of a frequently unwilling audience, is one of the toughest aspects of teaching.

That, plus the fact that a sizeable percentage of the children would really rather be somewhere else, which creates a constant undercurrent of tension that most adults won't encounter in any other job.

(Imagine going into your job as a restaurant manager and having to placate customers who have been forced to eat in your joint against their will, or an office where half your colleagues want to quit, but aren't allowed to.)

Teaching is decidedly not a cushy number, and long holidays are probably what keeps so many going in their careers for so long. Hoary old attacks on teachers, centring on the idea that they have it easy, are wearyingly not to the point. What's more, they make teachers even less receptive to valid criticisms that their customers - the children and their parents - have of the present school system.

There's no doubt that teaching is an increasingly stressful and under-appreciated job, but teachers' own defensiveness, and seeming distrust of parents, is doing little to turn that situation around.

One teacher reports how a 14-year-old boy called her a "tramp" after receiving a minor rebuke; sexual harassment of women teachers is seemingly quite common. Teachers have to worry about parents who might turn violent, and are shocked at how a growing number of parents won't accept that their child can do any wrong. Many certainly feel unappreciated.

But beneath all this you sometimes get the sense that the teaching profession here hasn't yet adjusted to the idea that their word is not law - to the loss of status that they enjoyed in Irish society up to about 30 years ago.

It shows up in small ways and big: an excellent scheme to encourage shared reading between parents and children is initiated without the slightest consultation with parents; a second-level school changes different bits of its uniform as frequently as a football club changes strips, again, with no apparent consultation with the parents who will pay for the changes.

AND THEN there is the biggest, most contentious issue of all: accountability. Few parents want a crude pay-for-performance system for teachers. But they would like it if there was some way of addressing the problem of bad teaching in our schools.

There are perfectly nice people who are simply bad at their jobs. The problem is that bad teachers cause a lot more long-term damage than, say, a bad journalist. (The National Union of Journalists might make it difficult for an employer to get rid of a semi-competent employee, but that person will generally not end up in a position where he or she can publish inaccurate or libellous stories.)

However, it appears that schools can do nothing to neutralise the damage a bad teacher can do - and the undiscussable problem doesn't get addressed unless a teacher does something completely outrageous.

Teachers would presumably accept that what they do is critically important. They might well say this is another argument for paying them better. More parents would be likely to support that view if they felt that under-performance by teachers was going to be addressed.

It's certainly more than a little ironic to hear teachers defending the crude but efficient and transparent points system by which our children are judged, while arguing vigorously against any way of measuring their own performance.

Talking to friends who are teachers, and reading the revealingly humorous Staff Room column on the back page of Education & Living, makes you realise that parents and teachers often view the school world in fundamentally different ways. For teachers, parents are frequently those unreasonable people who won't accept that little Gareth or Gobnait can do wrong/will never become a rocket scientist.

For parents, teachers can be the people who don't acknowledge their children's individuality/ appreciate their good points/address their learning problems.

Most of us accept that our children (like ourselves) will be lucky to meet more than a handful of the inspiring kind of teacher whose enthusiasm is infectious, and who can change lives. Most professions produce only a handful of superior talents, after all.

But if parents generally got the sense that teachers on the ground really believed that they - and indeed, the children themselves, through elected student councils - had some contribution to make to their schools, if they were willing to take a leaf from the books of the much-derided cramming schools and look on us as customers, it might increase parents' support for teachers.