The Occupational Hazards of Teaching

If you teach for a number of years, it is inevitable that some aspects of it would rub onto your daily life. Even for me, I do find that I am tempted to do something in public that would only be more acceptable in the classroom. If you are entering teaching, or if you are a BT, you may want to be warned of some of the following occupational hazards following a long teaching career:

1. You become highly sensitive to spelling and grammar.

Blame it on marking all those English compositions. Once you become trained and used to skimming through written text and picking out spelling and grammar mistakes in a hurry, you immediately notice these mistakes everywhere in public. ( maybe even in my blog! ) And after a few stints as oral examiners, you may find yourself correcting the way your friends pronounce words more than once.

2. You become more impatient.

In school, everything runs on a tight schedule from 7:15am to 1:00pm. You cannot afford to be too late for lessons, or you run the risk that the next class will erupt into chaos. High value is placed on punctuality in this line. So you cannot understand why your friends can be 20 minutes. Or why your facial therapist has to delay your appointment by 15 minutes. Tsk tsk! Can't these people start on time?

3. You are tempted to scold children misbehaving in public.

After all, you do this all the time in school. If children are misbehaving, it is your duty to correct them and tell them the proper behaviour isn't it? You are so used to doing this in school that when you see the same thing in public, you can't help yourself and you tell them off. The child usually looks at you with a big-eyed stare, ( he isn't your student and he doesn't know you ) and the parent of the child usually looks at you like you are a kidnapper. You are well-advised to keep the comments to your own schoolchildren.

4. You never see a red pen in the same way again.

Let's just say, after school hours, I use every colour of pen except red.

That's my 4 occupation hazards of being a teacher. Do you find yourself doing some of these? Or do you have other strange habits brought on by teaching? Do share in the comments!