More teachers consider early retirement because of disrespectful pupils

More teachers are considering early retirement because of disrespectful pupils and a lack of discipline in the classrooms.

Zane Lombard said she was ready to throw in the towel after four years of teaching.

“As an assistant teacher, I struggled to discipline the pupils because I was younger than my colleagues. How can I teach children who have no respect for me?”

Lombard said a pupil hit her after he refused to do his work.

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“I asked him to complete his work after he refused to do it. He stood up and hit me on my arm,” she said.

She claimed some pupils were smoking dagga at the age of seven or eight years old.

“I had to do ground foundation revision with Grade 5 pupils. These children grow up in circumstances where a family of eight lived in a two-bedroom house, where parents abused each other and the children. It was like negative manners were their way of coping,” she said.

Lombard said it took her 25 minutes to get the pupils settled during a 40-minute class. She once arrived at school and found her class ransacked with tests and books scattered across the classroom, with vulgar things written inside, she said.

“Teaching the choir pupils was the only thing I enjoyed because I felt safe. At least they wanted to be there.”

Lombard said, should she leave, she won’t teach again.

“You spend 75% of the time teaching pupils the manners they didn’t learn at home. It’s not like the old days when pupils had respect for educators. Now, children have more rights than the teachers. It made it difficult and impossible to teach them. That’s why teachers retire earlier,” she said.

Grade 1 teacher Roxy Herald, not her real name, said she doesn’t know where this generation went wrong.

“We are in trouble. When I hand out homework, 14 pupils don’t do it.”

Herald said she once kept a child in class during a break as punishment for not completing homework.

“She won’t listen to me or do her homework. The child is seven years old. When I phoned the parent, she said: ‘I’m so embarrassed. I’ll talk to her.’”

Apart from pupils using shocking language, Herald said teachers were not allowed to raise their voices at pupils and had to beg to get a word in during classes. She said she used a whistle to calm the chaos.

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“The classes were overcrowded with 36 Grade 1s in one class. You want to help those struggling with their work but you have to play policeman.”

Herald said more and more teachers were retiring before the age of 65 because they can’t handle the hostile situations in schools any longer.