Are Teachers Really To Blame?
A LOT has been said by educational experts as well as laymen regarding the performance of school learners especially at grade 10 and 12 levels. Parents and learners themselves have contributed to such debates, be it on television, radio, seminars or even among friends sauntering along pavements. Unfortunately, most of such discussions lay the blame squarely at the feet of the teacher, rightly or wrongly so.
As a teacher who has seen it all, I wish to put it very bluntly that teaching is a thankless job that calls for steadfastness in the face of ceaseless annual recriminations. I say so, noting that whenever learners do not perform according to expectations the teacher takes the flak. And when they do well, the learners are praised for being hard workers, committed, intelligent, dedicated. Very little or sometimes nothing at all is mentioned to give due credit to the teacher for the year’s contribution in ensuring that the learners do well in their final examinations.
Teaching is a holistic process of moulding a learner, rather than just eradicating his/her assumed ignorance in a specific subject. By virtue of being gregarious institutions, schools have a lot of stakeholders who need to be meek enough to apportion the blame or credit evenly for the performance of our learners. It thus serves no purpose to keelhaul the poor teacher, year in and year out, for the unsatisfactory performance of learners. This brings to mind the aphorism that “When a coconut falls and breaks the tusk of an elephant next to the tree, don’t blame the coconut, but rather look for whatever caused the fruit to drop”. So the relentless onslaught of hauling teachers over the coals for the poor performance of students is not a long-term solution to the problem at hand.
While the usage of English is a medium of instruction, it is disheartening to actually note that there are many teachers who can hardly produce a complete grammatically correct English statement. It is this linguistic deficiency that has made it a common practice for some teachers to explain concepts in their mother tongues, both in and outside class. Honestly speaking, English, like any other language, requires constant practice for one to achieve a respectable level of proficiency, more so if you are required to instruct your subject in English. The idea of saying “You understand ‘mos’ “ is retrogressive, to say the least. Students are very good at imitating what we say as teachers. And if a teacher can’t speak correct English, it stands to reason that we must not expect the pupils to speak or write the language well. We should therefore be role models in this regard.
Lastly, the issues advanced in this article are by no means the only challenges in our educational system. But for now, I wish to rest my case for readers’ inputs.
Stephen Tackson Mwanza
(Mathematics and English teacher)
Putuavanga Secondary School,
Opuwo