Crikey eyejaw,

if a student needs Maths tutoring then he/she is probably not coping with the Maths they are doing in class.

That means that the parent who is forking out their hard earned expects you find some point from where you can build up the child’s understanding whether it be a Year 10 concept or Year 8 concept.

We call this process teaching and yes it is hard work.

I work in a high school and am frequently horrified by my colleagues' abuse of the English language. Every day, I am bombarded with emails riddled with poor spelling, shocking grammar and terrible punctuation. I can accept the occasional slip-up, but what I see can hardly be described as 'occasional'.

As teachers, we often talk about 'automaticity'. When we know the rules of language to the point of automaticity, we don't have to think before we apply them. We can use apostrophes without any problems, we can structure sentences easily and we can express our ideas lucidly. The occasional typo is to be expected; regular errors are unacceptable.

Now, if we do not know our language rules to the point of automaticity, how can we expect our students to? Every time we spell something incorrectly on the blackboard, we are failing our students. I'm all for the testing of teachers, partly because I know that I would pass. It would also mean that I wouldn't have to spend my life correcting the mistakes my students have learnt from my colleagues.

God damn it all, now they've got me doing it!

You're right: The horror of these creeping irritations is that, at this point in time, they are so insidious.

Yes, one was deliberate.

Could they be preparing the students for management?
Lets face it, the ability to spout incomprehensible rubbish with no substance is a prerequisite for senior positions these days.
Sadly "soft skills" such as toadying, body language awareness and "me too Boss!" are *way* more important than real skills in the modern career landscape.

Sadly, a lot of these language problems do originate from Universities.

From '02 to '06 I waged a continual war against Edu-speak in my own courses. I had one lecturer in particular who would go through my assignments and convert my plain English to Edu-speak incomprehensibility with the irritating preface "You mean...".

One article we were given as required reading in a Drama class was so incomprehensible that a group of us approached our Lecturer and begged her to translate it. She, cornered, finally admitted that she herself did not understand much of it, but that as the writer was the author of several books on Drama we would benefit from familiarity with these works. Benefit?

It reminds me very much of the way Australians used to regard Art. The more incomprehensible it was, the more it was felt to be good for us. This resulted in a fiasco concerning a painting called "Blue Poles" for which the Government itself paid a ridiculous sum in a bid to buy a little cultcha. The painting itself however, was the artistic equivalent of the Emperor’s New Suit.

Now, in my own classes, at the beginning of each semester I post a list of phrases and words which I refuse to accept in student essays and detract marks for obfuscation.

This is the same argument that politicians use, Baxter Sin, and about as convincing.

>>The solution is simple and Queensland teachers are working at it now. Pay teachers more. Pay a hell of a lot more.<<

The underlying theme is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Therefore, jack up the pay, and you'll get...

Unfortunately, much as politicians have, teachers have exhausted their credibility credits with the public at large. As a group - and I have to say that I have also met some really fantastic individual teachers - as a group, teachers are seen as failing our children.

Many of them blame the system - "I'd like to encourage the bright kids, but they won't let me", or "I'd like to enforce a little discipline in the classroom, but my hands are tied" - and I suspect that there is indeed more than a little dead-hand-of-PC involved.

But unless the system itself is changed, and teachers are allowed to excel (or fail), there is little real point in granting them across-the-board pay rises

As it is with politicians. Unless and until we are allowed to measure politicians on their performance - starting, obviously, with the pre-election commitments they make, then feel free to ignore - they shouldn't be paid one cent more.

Unfortunately, only one of these two groups is in the position to unilaterally decide they deserve more.