so that's why the long holidays...
by John Craig
'All in all, modern organization is a contraption designed to make human actions immune from what the actors believe and feel privately.'
So said Zygmunt Bauman in his Demos pamphlet, Alone Again. Maybe. Our work on the teaching profession draws on work looking at the blurring of the boundaries between home and work and between professional and commercial life. We argue that, far from divorced from the private feelings, teachers' work draws more on personal and emotional resources than ever before, colonising their relationships and private thoughts. We argue that it's this character of their work - not their 'workload' - that can make teaching so stressful and exhausting. Some argue that it is just this personal burnout from which professionalism is meant to protect us. Much more on that to follow in our collection of essays on the subject.