Are Singaporean School Teachers Whiners?

By b44styreraug

Among the teacher friends I have encountered, I never fail to see any of them who do not go around complaining about their jobs.

And here are the typical gripes:

1. Darn difficult to manage expectations of both students and parents.

Most jobs (especially service-related ones) requires some form of "answering" to customers anyway. Perhaps what they should to is to not freely give away their contact numbers to students and their parents.

2. Always being pressured by upper management to complete tasks on strict deadlines. Also need to endure office politics in the meanwhile.

Which job doesn't involve the above mentioned downsides? And I can say, there are several executive level jobs that require more level of "answering to" as compared to what is required of these teachers concerning their HODs. When it comes to office politics, most of the problems they complain about are merely petty issues such as who gets saddled with more relief teaching duties. Or which individuals gets ostracized by a common clique, who gets bullied by a certain pompous senior in the staff room. To be honest, all these are extremely trivial whimpering at best.

3. Annual ranking based on KPI.

Again... which job doesn't employ such methodology to scrutinize performance? If you suck, you suck. Stop blaming the situation and everything else except yourself.

4. Long working hours. Apart from having to report to work at 0630 and only being allowed to leave the campus at 1700 everyday, they still have tons of scripts to mark at home.

Boo f***ing hoo! I work from 0700 to 0000 almost on a daily basis. I spend most of the "office hours" fighting fires and the remaining few on administrative work in my cubicle - not from the comfort of my own home mind you!

Quite frankly, I believe the justification for all their whining is most probably attributed to their low starting paychecks and subsequent snail-like wage increments. Take that away, I reckon they are just beta creatures who can never properly survive in other parts of the civil service or the external corporate world .

This first appeared as a post on a Hardwarezone Forums thread on 21 January 2018. Do join in the discussion over there if you have thoughts to share.


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