Everybody's tired

I just woke up. It's a Saturday morning. 5.52am.

Reason: My biological clock is wired as such - to wake up at 5 plus or 6. And I had slept early yesterday after a 10.5 h day at work. I felt exhausted at 5.30pm, right after I was 'let off'. By the time I reached home, I was pooped. Tried sleeping but couldn't. When my mother left me with Coco and Baby, I tried to keep myself awake, but dozed off a million times while I was entertaining Baby between 8 to 10pm. I was woken up by Baby's cries intermittenly and held on, while dozing off intermittenly, till William returned. The moment he came back, I conked out immediately.

For a few days this week, I had the chance to chit chat for a few minutes with a few colleagues on different days. Usually, I saw them while going to class and I remarked,"I wake up every morning and ask myself if I can skip school for the day." Surprisingly, they gave me the same reply,"I ask myself if I can take MC every day." 3 teachers ie. one is an untrained, contracted teacher, another is an experienced teacher who had previously worked in a secondary school, the latest one I spoke to is a level head who is thriving well in school, said the same thing, exactly, at different time, different spots of the school.

Another colleague who was photocopying worksheets poured her heart out to me,"I am very tired. Really very tired. If you tell me that this is a three quarter load for a new teacher, I am prepared to die next year when they give me the 'full' load."

I find it so sad that everybody's so tired and nothing's being done about it.

The high MC rate speaks for itself. But our exhaustion is interpreted as 'laziness' and 'reluctance to work' by the management, apparently. And they have a term for it - 'Mass MC'.

The last colleague told me that her niece, who is also a teacher in another school, told her that she gets to go home at 2 plus every day. That's unheard of in my school! She asked her,"What about your marking?" The niece replied,"We marked them during our free period." But for us, our free period is used to make a dash to various places to get other things done. The niece said that they used to take care of the whole level like we did, but it got too tiring and everybody came together and decided that they would take care of their own classes before everybody died of exhaustion.

Now I can understand why my friend in the same school as the niece kept telling me that she is very result-oriented. Because you are responsible for your class! That's the reason. When you're responsible for various things at the level level, you would be too preoccupied and busy with other things and don't have time to plan for your own class.

It's just common sense, really. But I guess sometimes the management lives in their ivory tower for so long they can't see it. Or they forget the fundamentals and want to fly high at the expense of their staff.