LET nobody kid you. A teacher's job is not an easy one. I know this for a fact, because I speak from brief and unhappy experience. As a raw 21-year-old, fresh out of university, I signed up for a teaching course.

It was a one-year crash-course for graduates designed to turn wet-behind-the-ears college boys and girls into steely professionals able to take everything class 4B could throw at them - and it involved two long stretches of teaching practice.

Being the woolly, idealistic sort, I volunteered to teach at the toughest school around - an inner city comp in north Leicester. My pupils ate me alive.

The story has grown in the telling: but the reality was no less awful for that. I remember screaming myself hoarse in an attempt to get some quiet. I remember the sniggers, indifference and teenage insolence that built to a virtual riot by the end of many of my classes. I remember a chair being thrown at me in a fit of pique.

The high-point of my brief and inglorious career as a teacher came on my last day of teaching practice when I had the gall to try and lead a drama class. It descended into chaos and in the end I had to march the class back to their classroom, where I and they sat in total silence glowering at each other for the remaining 20 minutes of the lesson. It was surrender. They knew it and I knew it, and I vowed never to set foot in a classroom again.

But it wasn't simply the discipline problems that left me shattered and panic-stricken every morning as I got off the bus outside school. The sheer volume of work - the endless marking and lesson planning - seemed to consume my life, leaving me pale and haggard by Friday night and already dreading Monday morning.

Believe me when I tell you teaching's just about the hardest job there is - and I include in that being a policeman, a firefighter, a miner and even a journalist.

Teachers have been getting a bad press recently. Film producer Lord Putnam, the new chairman of the General Teaching Council, told an audience in York only last year that they were seen by many people as 'whingers'. The hard-line attitude of some of the more militant teaching unions has hardly helped. Many people, worried first and foremost about their own children's education, found it hard to understand why attempts to differentiate between good and bad teachers, and to pay good teachers more, should have been greeted with such outright hostility.

There are bad teachers, and it is important they are identified and helped to improve. But most of our teachers are hard-working, competent professionals who want to do their best for the children they teach. They are simply overwhelmed by the workload, by the constant stress of meeting league table targets, by red tape - and by the endlessly-changing demands of the political masters of the day.

That's why it is so heartening to hear North Yorkshire headteacher Sue Sayles, who took over this week as president of the National Association of Headteachers, speaking up for teachers and calling on all concerned - teachers themselves, civil servants, politicians - to "work together to save the teaching profession."

Mrs Sayles, headteacher of Riccall County Primary School near Selby, has pledged to meet civil servants, Government ministers and bosses from organisations such as Ofsted and the Teacher Training Agency - the "people who come up with initiatives and policies", as she calls them - in an attempt to make them aware what those policies will mean in the classroom.

Children, she points out, only have one chance of a decent school education. And all the tinkering and educational reforms in the world won't ensure they get it if their teachers are overworked, bogged down with targets and paperwork, and completely demoralised.