ABSTRACT
It is easy to feel overwhelmed in today’s world. As a classroom teacher, for example, there is an enormous range of demands and expectations. These could include the extra work involved in introducing a new syllabus without appropriate professional development, the tendency to blame schools for their ‘failure’ to adjust quickly enough to technological change, or to see them at fault for not doing enough to address adequately social ills in the broader society. It could be, also, the day-to-day pressures and routines of teaching, school assemblies, period bells, playground duty and inordinately long staff meetings with agendas set elsewhere. Coupled with a sense that teaching as a profession is not valued as highly as it should be and that many schools are seriously under-resourced, it is not surprising to find that ‘burn-out’ is a frequently heard term in the lexicon of many teachers. Joy at teaching and joy at learning may have largely gone and given way to cynical realism. For some, there may be a sense of machine-like relentlessness about what schools are now and what they will be in the future.
