I want our schools to be better.
I believe that the biggest improvement we can make to our schools is to be fussier about who we allow to teach in them.
I look forward to the day where the teaching profession is non-unionised, and underperforming teachers who have lost the passion and spark that our students so deserve are able to be relieved of their duty.
I hope we find ways to identify those teachers who cannot teach, or have lost interest in doing it well, or who see what they do as a paycheck rather than a calling, and find ways to respectfully but firmly move them on, as they have no place in today’s classrooms.
I want to be a part of a teaching profession where you need to reinvent yourself every year, where having interests and skills outside “the system” make you better at what you do, and where we don’t confuse “20 years of experience” with “1 year of experience, repeated 20 times”.
I want an educational system where students experience the joy of learning from teachers who are still themselves joyful about learning.
I want my own children to be taught by passionate, caring teachers who lose sleep at night wondering how to be better at what they do. And I want to be one of those teachers for other people’s children.
I think we owe these things to the next generation.