SETA SURVEY (SCIENCE EDUCATION TECHNICIANS AUSTRALIA

[mbagaoisan]

Hi all,

I hope you are all well.

My former School send me a link from SETA, Please take a couple of mins to fill out the survey. It's not very long.
Make yourself a cup of tea/coffee/cold drink and fill out the survey.
It will be beneficial for us and future lab techs working in schools.

https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/ ... .microsoft



Thank you

MB

[Marama T]

Done!! Thanks for that. I had a fabulously satisfying whinge about the pay.

[mbagaoisan]

Great- Yess!! Same here..

[Pm706Narrogin]

Thanks for sharing

I hope that final box is pretty open in terms of word limit cause I get the feeling I'm gonna have a nice evening vent putting the system on blast

I love what I do. I'd like my employer to come to the party and recognise a lot of the time they're getting the benefit of a high degree of knowledge and technical skill from all of us for the pay of what amounts to a warm body that can use a sink

[Prima]

I wrote a pretty long essay for the final box and it wasn't rejected! Hopefully they are all going to be read and discussed

[Pm706Narrogin]

I hit the word limit and in the end took some out, added my email address and basically told them "if you want more I can give you so much more"

[bigmack]

Filled it out .
My main points were that School lab techs need to understand that their primary position is to help teachers deliver science to students . After all , we work in a school .

It would seem that too many Lab techs I have meet or heard of have no real understanding of what actually goes on in a classroom or how their work either makes or breaks the delivery to students by the teachers they are meant to be supporting .

So my issue is that schools choose Lab techs based on the Cert III Qualifications which means they are able to tick all the WHS and compliance boxes but have very little idea or knowledge about what is actually expected from them on a day to day basis in a school science environment .

For example ( these are just some that my wife has seen over the years ) , sending droppers of universal indicator out without checking that they are all green . Or Iodine droppers that are so clear they are useless . Glasswear that is so dirty that adding universal indicator suddenly changes colour before anything has been added to test . Empty boxes of matches or used ones . Droppers of acid that are almost empty or have had water added and are so weak they don’t work .
Torches with flat batteries , dead power supplies , blown light globes , faulty electrical leads . Burnt out ammeters , intermittent rheostats , dirty microscopes , ones that don’t focus , rusty or broken scalpels . Scissors that won’t cut . Rubber bands that are so perished they are useless . The list goes on and on .
All these little things make a teachers prac time become a nightmare and the students roll their eyes because yet another prac is dumb or doesn’t work .

I know that many of us are under the pump , but the number one thing that a Labby should get right is to test each and everything that goes out to make sure it it is as good as it can be .

[Pm706Narrogin]

That's why I answered "no" to the question about whether my qualifications made me feel prepared for the job.

Sure I have a geology degree. Our rock and mineral collection is organised like a beauty. I also have a biology degree. I've done fieldwork and been able to provide support for upper school Biology when they're doing fieldwork. I know enough chemistry that I can wrangle most chemistry things.

But there's lots of day to day things, especially repairs, that bar finding a "how to" guide on google or just having a go at pulling it apart, I wouldn't have a clue on what to do through my quals alone.

Part of what I included in my response was that even if I wanted to learn, where is the training? It's purely dependent on the on the job training you can get from someone else. At least in WA, we get one single day of organised training a year and that's if you're lucky enough to get the sessions you choose. Maybe intermittently there might be more. But the Regional Technicians Group seems to have been gutted by the Department to the point all the Department sees is those WHS and compliance boxes. Even their job titles are now "Science Safety Advisors" which tells me my own employer only sees the WHS and compliance part of my role. The support network for someone like myself to learn common faults with school science equipment and how to fix them is non-existent. There's not somewhere I can go for a day or two and be shown how to pull things apart and fix them which is, you know, an essential part of the job. The idea that the job has skills that need to be learned and developed through support and training seems foreign to them.

If my training is solely dependent on the skills, experience and generosity of the labbie in the role that shows me what to do, that's not a sustainable system