Oh god, here we go again.

In the "good old days" when kids got a real education at school, kids came out of high school at 17, & after 2 years at teachers college were in the primary school teaching kids at 19. They did a much better job than the precious twits with todays Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet top degrees, & a far too high opinion of their own importance & ability.

As a 16 year old school boy officer in the cadet core I was taking 2 platoons, 60 kids for rifle & bren gun instruction, then overseeing a platoon of 30 on the rifle range, something I doubt many of our "professional" teachers could actually do.

As a visiting council library librarian my wife would have 4 classes, up to 90 kids dumped on her, so the poor "over worked" teachers could get a break.

You got it wrong Peter. Todays teachers are over educated, over paid, but under worked. It might be different if they were actually professional, but unless we bring back in class inspection of teachers ability, & get rid of the bottom 40% of them, our kids are the ones suffering, not the teachers.

Bren gun instruction? Visiting Council Librarians?

Your stories from the 1940s never fail to amuse Hasbeen.

Every time you put your fingers on the keyboard the picture you paint of your irrelevant anachronistic attitudes and cluelessness to modern living becomes sharper and more detailed.

It's quite entertaining really.

Besides babysitting, what is it that teachers do that a well designed app couldn't do better?
The government spends nearly 16bln a year paying 300,000 teachers to do what could be done a whole lot better from a handful of teachers and experts in several fields.
They concentrate on keeping a 'standard' of teacher quality across the board when they could just create one single superior product.
Kids spend most of their lives in front of TV's or tablet apps anyway.
At least then, all kids would could get private school quality teaching in a digital form. Better than a nearly all female model with teachers having short teaching careers, most quitting after a few years which means more teachers are inexperienced, then we have teacher shortages as well, people in the country not getting decent teachers etc.

Whats the point?
It's all just a waste of damn money.
Half the damn kids heading into high school these days can't even read.

Its all an outdated stupid, inefficient and unproductive system.
Total waste of money better to spend the money teaching them responsibility and actual skills to help them get into work when the time comes.

Move over to a completely digital school curriculum, end all the bs - parents can view what their kids are being taught themselves (the actual lessons) and just hire teachers aides or security guards to keep em in line like the little shites deserve.

"Playground duty in a hot or freezing playground is tedious".

You lost me at this stage ... It is part of what being a Teacher is all about . Always has been and always will be.

They knew that when they decided to be Teachers.

It's a wonder that they haven't delegated those duties to someone else.. or have they ?

Teachers are more interested in Pay , Conditions and Progressive Social Engineering and have little regard for the Students and their parents if,once again , they are contemplating a Strike !

They are Greenies who have been in School all their lives and who have bugger all idea of the 'real' world.

I don't think that things were wonderful in the good old days, if you were there.

Hardly any permanent jobs to be found sounds pretty grim, if you want to buy a house anytime soon.......

WTF?

Want the same Maths and Science results and success as Singapore and other Asian nations?
It is not a big deal.
The pedagogies used in other countries to achieve outstanding results for students are well known, documented and suggested practice in the current syllabus documents.
Unfortunately, these pedagogies require most teachers, administrators and parents to rethink their own biases.
It is well known which teaching strategies are a complete waste of students time and which ones produce results.
For example, try telling primary school parents (and teachers) that every single study ever done within OCED countries shows that giving homework (to primary school children) is a complete waste of time and see the reaction that you get.
Most primary school parents that I know believe that those schools that give the most homework are the better schools.
The sad reality is that weak-willed administrators and lazy teachers are prepared to give the students a carbon copy of the parents’ own education because that is the path of least resistance.
I cannot see the situation changing any time soon.