So, here I am - a PPA Teacher from the UK. For those abroad who don't know what PPA stands for, it's “Pushed, Peed-Off and Abused!” I'm kidding. It actually stands for Planning, Preparation and Assessment and the word “cover” is often missed out - PPA Cover teacher. In a nutshell, my job is to take over classes for other teachers whilst they do their 10% designated non-contact planning, preparation and assessment. To many, this may sound like an easy option and to those people I offer the invitation to try it.
First of all, though, how has Education come to this? How have the Government managed to make a teacher's life so hard that they need 10% of their time out of the classroom to catch up on paperwork? I don't remember my teachers needing time out to do paperwork and we turned out okay! (Well, most of us did, anyway…) And why does the Government think that throwing money at the problem will help? I can imagine the conversation now…
MoE (Minister of Education): What shall I do? What shall I do? We've asked the teachers to take on so much paperwork and so many useless new initiatives that they don't have time to do it all and they're leaving the profession in droves!!!!
Lackey: Well, er, what does the Government usually do in these cases?
MoE: Oh, well done, Lackey. A fabulous idea - we'll throw a pot of money at the schools so they can employ more teachers to take over from the usual teachers whilst the usual teachers take time out to catch up on all the useless paperwork created by even more useless initiatives! Brilliant!
Lackey: Oh. (Pause) Wouldn't it be a better idea to relieve the teachers' workloads by cutting down on the number of useless initiatives that plainly aren't working, and thereby cutting down on the paperwork so teachers didn't need time out and the extra money could be put towards resources to make the existing teacher's lives easier and also improve the children's education?
At this point, the MoE has to go and have a lie down because common sense is an alien concept to many politicians and will fry their brains if they have to give it a go…
To get back to what I was saying before I shot myself in the foot - PPA is not an easy job. To begin with, there's the “teacher's planning or own thing?” minefield to negotiate. Is it a better idea to go with the class teacher's planning or to do your own thing? If you go with the teacher's planning then you have all the stress and angst of wondering if you've done it right? Have you taught the lesson how the teacher would have wanted it taught? Did the children learn anything from you? Did you cover the Learning Objective sufficiently? This is even worse if the lesson is a continuation of the weekly numeracy or literacy stuff. So you decide to do your own thing. If you do this, you're left with the pain of all the planning and the resource-finding that goes with it. You find (like me) that even though you're only contracted to work part-time, you spend a huge percentage of your time off doing this work.
Me? I chose to do my own planning because I was fed-up with getting to the class and finding that the teacher hadn't had time, or couldn't be bothered, to leave the planning for me and therefore finding myself up the creek without a paddle (or a lesson plan). The other thing was, because PPA often means teaching more than one class in a day, I had to spend lunchtimes running round trying to pin down the member of staff I was covering next to find out what I was doing and coming up against the attitude, “Do you mind? This is my lunch break. I'll talk to you later.” Of course, by “later”, they mean at five to one when you have no time for the photocopying they haven't bothered to do, since they assumed you'd be doing it and it would be one less job for them, or, should the lesson be art, no time to get the art equipment out before the kids come streaming in, high as kites, from the playground. (This is the “Pushed” bit, by the way.)
Then, of course, being PPA and part-time, you come up against the “second-class citizen” phenomenon, where your opinions and ideas are ignored or pushed to the back of the queue behind the full-time, classroom teachers' opinions and ideas because you're only PPA or only part-time. You begin to feel demoralized because you aren't allowed to have an opinion - hey, why should you be having problems? You're only in school half the time and when you are you're just covering for someone else. You have no right to comment on whether new initiatives are a waste of time or not - better to listen to those people who have a class of their own and who are in school for enough hours to implement the initiatives. (This is the “Peed-Off” bit.)
