Teachers who give 100% are often those taking sleeping pills, Valium, are in a depression or dealing with a nervous breakdown. Teachers who give 100% are the ones who develop cancer or die of a heart attack, just before retiring. Teachers who give 100% should be given hazard pay. These are not statistics, but they are a grim reality of teaching.

Teaching, like any other profession comes with a wide spectrum of competent and talented individuals, along with others who are not quite up to snuff and their capabilities are in question. Like every other profession, there are those teachers who give 100% plus, and those who come and go with the ringing of the school bell. In my opinion, people who enter the teaching profession and view it as a 9-5 job, with extensive vacation time should not be teachers. They will reap very few rewards, and worse still have little impact on the students they teach.

When administration found out I had many more talents besides teaching music, they decided to be creative by cutting my exposure time for Grade 7/8 instrumental music and decided to throw me to the dogs, so to speak. The first course they gave me to teach was a life skills kind of course with an emphasis on the world of work. Before preparing for that course ( which took me the whole summer), I found out at the board level, there was only a title to the course. No one had ever taught it, there was no board guideline. I was on my own.

I was rather proud of the course I had created. I found it most interesting and practical, and helpful. But then I was the teacher. Another story with the students who had no course to sign up for except for the course I had created for them. Out of 19 students, only one passed in a resume. They would not do budgets, they knew all about surviving. Needless, to say the course was defunct the next year.

Then they threw me into an academic English course. I loved English and loved teaching it. I felt semi-confident about teaching English because I was a good teacher. Now, besides all the hours I spent with band rehearsals, performances, and band trips, as dded an extra burden of marking lengthy English assignments. Ask me if I gave my 100% that year?

The next year, it was history. I had no credibility because there was a stamp on my forehead which read " music teacher only". After three years of teaching history, I had found my niche and you couldn't tell me from a history/music teacher.

Teachers are territorial.

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