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Let teachers teach

MALLIKA VASUGI | The Star/Asia News Network | Mon Feb 20 2012

A dream that teachers will be allowed to fulfil the purpose of their calling, facilitate the impartation of knowledge, skills and experience is what a columnist has.

AFTER having been in the profession for more than half my lifetime, it may seem a little late to be asking the following question."Who is a teacher?' or rather, "What really is the job description of a school teacher?"

But these are questions that have been in my mind a lot lately. To confirm my own answers that have become a little patchy and clouded over the years and to prevent any ruffling of feathers among education authorities, I actually did a bit of research on this one. And the summary of my findings confirmed my earlier hunch. A teacher's job primarily is to teach. Certainly not a mind-blowing answer is it?

Extending that a bit further, it would refer to facilitating the impartation of knowledge, skills or instruction to students.

Fine-tuning that phrase may mean that a teacher's job does include the development of schemes of work and lesson plans, preparing classroom activities, selecting learning materials and resources. It also includes observing and evaluating students, providing appropriate feedback, assigning and grading student work, maintaining students' academic records, managing student behaviour and discipline, supervising extra-curricular activities, helping with the organisation of school functions, counselling students with academic problems and providing student encouragement.

Come to think of it, that's a whole load that is required of teachers but most of the time we are so busy carrying all of it out that we don't actually stop to think about it.

In fact stopping to think about why we are doing and what we are doing is a luxury these days. Who has the time for that anyway?

And so we carry on doggedly day after day, hour after hour, taking in whatever new duty that is thrown in our direction, mentally deciding which part of the wobbly haystack on our overloaded backs that extra piece of hay could fit in and resume our journey, albeit this time a little unsteadily.

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Keywords: teachers , teach , educate , knowledge , skills , experience

Readers' Comments

The fact about Singapore is, we do not pay for professionalism, but for showmanship. This means that a good teacher who only teach, will see his/her pay stuck at the lowest end of the educationist pay scale. This is the same for professional engineers. It is those who can polish apple and wayang who get ahead in life...I think this is may be true even in civil service, just look at our ministers...

Posted by kooldog59 on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 at 16:25 PM

MOE has made the teaching profession downgraded to become a service provider.
Not sure when was it that this happened; when MOE started making teachers to treat their pupils like customers; and bow down to unreasonable parents.
Also turning schools to be commercial organization; so principles are more interested in collecting accolades for themselves.:mad::mad:

Posted by think2say on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 at 16:19 PM

In Singapore, as long as the teacher does his part morally and ethically, no one will fault him.

MOE, please don't release anymore sex maniacs in our local schools !!

Posted by gerigeriyeo on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 at 14:47 PM

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