Sir, - As a secondary teacher for more than 20 years I have slowly absorbed all that the job entails; poor pay and conditions of work, little or no prospects of promotion, increasing levels of stress that only those who work with adolescents can understand, "holidays" spent working to clear the backlog of accumulated debts, and the frustration of working with weak, remedial and difficult children in overcrowded classrooms with no back-up. Add to this the frequent outpourings of contempt from a cynical media and you may agree, it is indeed a thankless job.
I can absorb no more, having finally reached saturation point when I opened my most recent pay cheque to find that the Minister had deducted pay for three days on which I worked. The Minister and the ASTI can sort out the rights and wrongs of this event in the courts over the coming months, and it will be entertainment for us all. For myself, I have learned a very valuable lesson and a very simple one: doing work for nothing is a mug's game.
On the noticeboard in the staff room in my school there are two lists. One is a voluntary rota for yard duty, the other a voluntary rota for providing cover for absent colleagues. I will be removing my name from both lists, and I will have to think long and hard before I participate in any non-teaching, unpaid work in the future. Maybe it's the times we live in? - Yours, etc.,
Bernard Lynch, Glendale Meadows, Leixlip, Co Kildare.