I always wanted to be a teacher, and volunteered in kindergartens from the age of 12 years old. My parents were teachers, two of my aunties, and my grandfather was a school principal for 45 years. I have a postgraduate teaching degree, and two Masters degrees in education, and I have worked in Catholic, independent and government schools.

I have always had the support of my principals, and been a valued member of my team.

Today, I will resign. Today, I will plan my last eight days of teaching and start searching for a job (probably at the supermarket). What else can I do?

I can no longer see myself struggling through the desperately sad environment that is teaching today.

Earlier this week a teacher stabbed a principal, and to me his actions are a very clear manifestation of a desperate, broken system.

The endless contracting of teachers, who every October are asked to apply for the job they are doing already, have done for many years.

They are asked to sit in a corridor waiting to be interviewed next to someone who may take their job, probably because they are cheaper. They have seven years of contract after contract.

They are rolled over one year, and the next lose their job in the last week of school without warning. Then there is the principal (yes, principal) who ranked her teachers 1-14, emailed the list to ‘all staff’, and stated she only had eight positions to offer.

Then, waited for those that could leave to leave, desperate, worried, sad, and then emailed ‘all staff’ her new list with the ranking order once again.

Or what about the principal who started her new role by showing everyone the electricity bill and asked if anyone would take responsibility for it?

Or, the principal that provided an awful reference for a staff member she didn’t want to lose. Or, the poor graduate who attended 24 interviews in three weeks, all of them someone else’s job because ‘they had to interview an external candidate’.

Then there's the 9 out of 10 jobs advertised on the DET site that are incumbent roles. Or, the leadership team that stated in a whole staff meeting ‘we need some experienced teachers to leave, so that we can employ cheaper graduates’.

Every October teachers in Victoria face this demoralising experience, over and over again. It is heartbreaking. The anxiety is debilitating at a time of year when teachers are already tired, exhausted, and should never have to carry the weight of poor wages, excessive workloads, and growing staff shortages.

The NDIS review this year found that nearly half of all NDIS participants were children with developmental delay or autism, with one-in-seven six-year-old boys funded in the scheme.

I have been watching this happen in my school classrooms. I have seen the decline in engagement of our boys in education. We have got it wrong – very wrong for these children.

They don’t need a diagnosis of disability, they need an education system that does not disable them. We have five to six boys in every class room at my school that are struggling with the expectations of system that has confused ‘direct instruction’ with explicit and high impact teaching strategies.

We have forgotten how to engage boys, and we have forgotten that the engagement of our most vulnerable benefits all our students.

Thus, our overworked, time-poor teachers are struggling with behaviour management, and without clear guidance of what good teaching and learning looks like in junior years classrooms, they move the students into forward facing rows, direct instruction, with endless slide shows, desperate to gain control.

Our classrooms look once again like something from 1890, over-crowded rows of miserable, desperate-looking children.

Their passionate, experienced mentors have been retiring in huge numbers, and with them we lose the wonderful gains of the past 30 years in education, where active, differentiated learning, HITS, vibrant classrooms are filled with bored children who are fighting to escape, and teachers who are lost in a cycle of exhaustion, fear, and anxiety, too frightened to teach.

Did I mention that a teacher stabbed a principal on Tuesday?