Focus

Tired, stressed and 'fed up'

By He Na (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-10 07:41

Children from a kindergarten in Huaibei, Anhui province, present handmade cards on Thursday to their teachers for the upcoming Teachers' Day. Wang Wen / for China Daily

Teachers under fire as obsession withexams takes toll. He Na in Beijing reports.

Vast numbers of teachers are suffering mental and physical health problems due to the intense pressure heaped on them by students, parents and school officials, education experts have warned.

Studies show that potentially thousands of teachers are already at breaking point, while many are quitting the classroom every year.

"I just want to lock myself in a quiet room and hide," said Tao Ling, an exasperated teacher at Changchun No 45 Middle School in Jilin province, ahead of Friday's Teachers' Day celebrations. "My husband says that if I continue to teach he'll go crazy as I often take out my anger on him."

Statistics compiled by the National Primary and Secondary School Mental Health Discussion Group in 2005, which is so far the most authoritative data, found almost half of the teachers involved suffered a mild or moderate mental illness.

About 2 percent had even received medical treatment for emotional distress, said organizers, who interviewed 2,292 teachers at 168 primary and secondary schools in Liaoning province.

A separate poll of more than 1,300 teachers across 13 districts of Shanghai last September also discovered that one-third were "fed up" and regretted joining the profession, according to the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences.

The situation is so serious, say experts, that if the authorities do not act quickly to relieve the pressure, it could have a disastrous effect on the development of China's students.

"I got on well with my students and won several prizes (for my work) but, to be honest, I just couldn't cope," said Shi Honglin, who left teaching last year after eight years at Yanqing No 3 Middle School in Beijing. He is now a magazine journalist.

"Teaching took up all my time; morning and evening studies, lessons in the afternoon," said the 35-year-old. "I only got half a day off a week and I hardly saw my daughter. I wanted a new life."

Although the workload took its toll, Shi said it was the "obsession with exam scores" that really drove him away.

"Not every student can be top of the class and you can't just judge excellence on exam results. School officials and parents don't seem to see that," he said. "When students fail a test, it's the teachers that come under attack, from all sides, regardless of how devoted they are."

Today, it is not only the students who sweat over exam results but also teachers and school principals.

Even though education departments do not use scores to rate schools and ban principals from announcing class rankings after exams, such information is still compiled informally and often distributed among teachers and parents.

Officials of schools lagging behind in these rankings not only face embarrassment but could also see an effect on future enrollment, which is closely connected to the amount of funding a school receives from the authorities.