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 con-terminous 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 (Rumbold 1988), and only semi-professional in status (Etzioni 1969). The image of teaching as a nine-to-three 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.
