ABSTRACT
Our ideas of what teachers do when they are at work may be conditioned to a large extent by the memories of our own experiences of teachers when we were pupils. We think of teachers as having fairly short hours of work, roughly coterminous with their pupils’ day, and rather long holidays by comparison with other workers in service industries. Moreover, teachers are thought to have it easy in another sense: the nature of the job itself is considered undemanding, particularly when young children are involved, and only semi-professional in status. The image of teaching as a 9-3 job, and the adage that, ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’, are deeply imprinted on the national, and perhaps the international, consciousness.
