Ease classroom pressures

IN ADDITION To PAYing TRIBUTE TO THE nation's teachers for their contributions to the country's educational cause and the cultivation of our younger generations, it seems to have become a regular practice around the annual Teachers' Day for the media and society to show concern about the pressures they face.

Before this year's Teachers' Day, which fell on Saturday, a survey in Shanghai revealed that this concern is probably well-founded as it painted a worrisome picture of pressures on primary and middle school teachers in the most-developed Chinese metropolis.

The random survey conducted by the Oriental Education Times and Fudan University on the happiness of Shanghai's primary and secondary school teachers revealed that 86.6 percent of the 1,426 teachers polled feel they are under great pressure from work, and 26.2 percent of them feel they are under huge pressure. Only 5.8 percent of the respondents said they do not feel any great pressure.