{"id":14546,"date":"2022-09-21T12:55:50","date_gmt":"2022-09-21T12:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/why-im-on-strike-speech\/"},"modified":"2022-09-21T12:55:50","modified_gmt":"2022-09-21T12:55:50","slug":"why-im-on-strike-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/why-im-on-strike-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m on strike – Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I love being a teacher. It is quickly the best and finest thing I can use my working life for. It is wonderful to work with young people and it feels meaningful to try to make a positive difference in the lives of young adults. But if there are no signals soon from KS and central politicians that that job is valuable and that children and young people should be invested in, then I may find something else to do. First and foremost, all possible sympathy for children and young people who have been home from striking schools in recent weeks, especially those who were taken out first and who have not started the school year yet. It must be demanding for both the children and the parents, I can easily understand that! As a teacher, I am primarily upset that these parents’ voices now seem to drown out and perhaps not fully understand what we strikers are trying to say: For me, this is as much a slightly desperate cry for help as it is a strike. Yes, this strike unfortunately affects many children and young people. At the same time, we teachers are now trying to say that if something is not done now with the allocation of resources to education, to children and young people in general, tomorrow’s school will hit many more children far, far harder than this strike. There have always been vulnerable students in Norwegian schools. That’s what it’s like to be young, then you’re extra vulnerable. The young people I meet at upper secondary school often have to cope with life, for better or for worse, during the years they attend upper secondary school. Then the school must be there to try to help them and we teachers stand there as part of the team around the student to assist with what we can. I have vulnerable students to a greater or lesser degree in each and every classroom. I miss all my students, but I naturally think extra about how some of those I know have extra big challenges are doing now. I am still striking because I know that the school is not able to take good enough care of these students already and that the vulnerable students who will come in the next few years will probably have even worse conditions if something is not done now. We know that there is a shortage of pedagogues and special pedagogues in all levels of Norwegian schools. We also know that not enough funds are allocated to advisers, environmental workers, health nurses and the rest of the team, both inside and outside the school, who ensure that children and young people are adequately looked after. From the start of kindergarten until I meet them at upper secondary school, children and young people will encounter professional, educational and psychosocial gaps because it is not safe, competent and experienced professionals who meet them, but – in many cases – unskilled assistants who do not have the competence or the experience to ensure the necessary security. The strike now is both about trying to close some of these competence gaps, but also about retaining the competence that is already there. Dissatisfaction among us teachers is now so great that many of us are considering leaving the classroom. 40,000 with teacher training already work outside school. Why not earn NOK 100,000 more a year and finish work at 16 – possibly learn to charge for overtime work? Why not invest in giving your own children more time and better conditions instead of simply trying to help other people’s children. With yet another salary settlement where we teachers end up behind comparable groups, the arguments for applying for this type of job will become even stronger. Thus, tomorrow’s school will quickly have to cover even bigger gaps. It will further increase the proportion of unskilled people in schools and it will affect vulnerable pupils to a far, far greater extent than this strike does. It’s so easy to think that “yes, but then maybe it’s not my child who is affected, it’s a bit too early, now there’s just been a pandemic and the politicians have to sort this out, because now it’s burning quite a lot the children’s room here, so the challenges of tomorrow’s school almost have to wait until tomorrow”. The only problem is that we have said this for quite some time. We have lost wage settlements more or less continuously since we left the state in 2004. We joined in 2020, when in my opinion we should have gone on strike, but rather accepted another bad wage settlement, precisely so as not to affect children during a pandemic. Rather, we threw ourselves around and learned digital aids in the evenings to run digital classrooms and make sure to keep the wheels of society moving and take care of those who needed it most. We then went back to the classrooms without vaccine and without infection control, with the same thought, to take care of vulnerable children. We tried to strike last year, together with the rest of UNIO, but then the forced wage board was tricked out in such a suspicious way that many wondered if we actually have the right to strike. Now, after another year in which our own employer, KS, treats us like residual waste, we are trying to speak out again with the hope of at least not ending up even further behind in salary development. Yes, it is silly to say that it is about salary. But pay actually matters, also for teachers. Increased pay makes it easier to give a little extra when the classroom is packed, the piles of homework are towering and even more children and young people need your expertise and security to get a little better in life. Increased pay gives a feeling of being appreciated for that job. Increased salaries for teachers and increased funds for schools and kindergartens are investing in the next generation and investing in the future. Increased pay makes it easier to keep the experienced employees who are now considering other opportunities. Increased pay means investing in knowledge and competence. Increased pay means taking vulnerable children and their parents seriously. ALSO READ:
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I love being a teacher. It is quickly the best and finest thing I can use my working life for. It is wonderful to work with young people and it feels meaningful to try to make a positive difference in the lives of young adults. But if there are no signals soon from KS and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14547,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[271,216],"class_list":["post-14546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-speech","tag-strike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}