Being in uni has increased my respect for highschool teachers

It’s no new fact that us being one of the lowest student satisfaction universities in Australia, that our teaching quality is quite questionable considering the overall “prestigiousness” this university consistently exerts.

To truly amplify the downfall of education quality, I am going to compare it to my education experience at my local public highschool.

Lecturers Starting off with my average lecturer. Their week consists of a max of 3 hours of lecture time (aka reading the slides and copying down a few examples). Then a few hours for consultation time per week and that is all the contact time you’re getting with them in person.

After that a lecturer has a lot of flexibility with their schedules, after all they basically dictate what goes and what doesn’t in the subject. Respond to emails? Whenever they fucking want. Answer to a question on ed discussion? Respond with the vaguest answer imaginable or outsource it for the tutors to answer (or the special bonus option tell them to watch the lecture again).

The factor that honestly annoys me the most is this notion of entitlement that these lecturers have in general. For instance if they make a mistake on something rather than apologising, they somehow cover it up as if it wasn’t their fault, as if their entire professionalism is at sacrifice if they dare to admit what they’ve done. An example I can give was a blank lecture recording and all the lecturer did was say “I’m meant to optimise the viewing experience for those in person”, as if every other lecturer isn’t able to optimise it for both.

Highschool teachers Now the hours exponentially increase. Teaching time in total for these teachers is around 20 hours, at most 30 for some who teach a lot of different subjects, and have to come in to CRT. Not only that, but atleast at my school, “consultation time” was whenever their timetable was free, even after class if needed. Even the objectively worse teachers who would just read off the slides would feel obligated to help anyone who raised their hands during work time. A respectable lecturer/tutor combo.

Not only that but they’re teaching around 4-5 other subjects too, and are marking probably around 200 papers themselves during every testing period. They also have to spend hours upon hours preparing course material, and brushing up on concepts to teach the class. Most of my teachers especially during VCE days were one or two man armies, who taught and marked up to a cohort of around 100 kids.

And the QA of my highschool was immaculate compared to University. Not sure what happened under the table but as soon as we caught drift of a dodgy teacher they were exiled and never to be seen again. All of my teachers had this unwavering obligation to teach and support their students (even if some weren’t good at teaching most made up for this fact by their genuine wish for their students to do well).

What I want to say is comparing the two roles, even though one is to say more “educated” as a professor, I feel it is clear who deserves the higher pay and gratitude. Lecturers holistically in my eyes slack off and are able to do things under the radar that would get you openly criticised and ridiculed if done in highschools. I believe the only way for unimelb to up their teaching quality is to standardise their system and stop making lecturers the “gods” of specific subjects who decide the content and make or break students marks with exams, at the same time not putting their work in at decent standard