Jack was studying for his A Levels and he had a punctuality problem which was SO not his fault. The bus service through town was diabolical - everbody knew that. It ran late, like, EVERY day. The construction work for the new flyover had been going on for nearly three years, and the resulting congestion meant that the morning rush hour was a logjam of traffic. Every single day, a bus journey which should have taken 20 minutes actually took 45 minutes, and every single day, Jack arrived at school 15 minutes late. Jack's mum had spoken to the bus company, but they had been really unhelpful. Jack was at the end of his tether; the bus was his only way of getting to school, and I was giving him grief every morning when it clearly wasn't his fault. What could he possibly do?
Well, I may be a grumpy old sod, but I think most teachers would have given Jack exactly the same advice as I did: get up earlier in the morning; catch an earlier bus.
The fact is that Jack's perception of his 'problem' was understandable but entirely mistaken. Jack knew the bus would be late arriving and that its journey would be delayed. He knew it at the start of term. Neither Jack, his mum, me or the headteacher could change this state of affairs. The real problem was that Jack had no realistic plan to cope with this situation, even though the solution was glaringly obvious to most adults involved. Most adults (Jack's mum was not one of them) saw the problem as one involving alarm clocks and parental nagging, rather than one involving transport infrastructure and construction schedules.
I guess you can see where this is heading: many teachers apply the same kind of mis-categorisation to their time-management problems as the unfortunate Jack did. They grouse about marking workload and exam timetables, and student reports, and a whole host of other unchanging and unchangeable features of their lives. These - the equivalent of the tardy bus - are not necessarily where the problem lies or - and this is much more important - they are rarely where the solution lies.