Teaching Remains A Challenge

TEACHING is a very challenging and demanding job. Demanding in the sense that should you opt to become a teacher, forget about knocking off from your duties even though you have official starting and finishing hours. Being an educator, you have to work both at school and at home.

Because of this sacrifice by sons and daughters of Namibia, we owe them respect. Educators are expected to teach and make sure learners have mastered the competencies for a certain grade before moving on to the next grade or level. Sometimes, educators are expected to perform miracles, something that is impractical.In most communities of Namibia, parents have low levels of understanding because not every parent received proper formal education and this made it difficult for parents to motivate their children about the importance of going to school or taking school work seriously.Communities play a major role as far as the education is concerned. But certain communities are made up of people who can neither read nor write. Therefore, children from these communities will have difficulties coping with the teaching and the learning process because their chances of hearing terms related to education such as science terms, for example, are very slim.The Namibian curriculum demands that all children must be taught in their mother tongue from grade 1-3, then in grade 4, kids must be taught in English with a little translation done in the mother tongue.Here is where trouble begins. Teaching English to a non-native speaker is not an easy thing. This is due to the fact that letter sounds (phonics) are not the same in English which is the medium of instruction.In some cases, the curriculum has forced people to do subjects they are not good at, or talented at, for example, mathematics. Not all of us are academicians, nor are we all mathematicians. However, this point is ignored by curriculum planners and therefore decided to make mathematics a compulsory subject at grade 11 and 12.I wonder as to how many math failures we will have since it’s an obvious thing that non mathematicians will surely fail math. For sure when they fail, the blame will fall on their beloved educators for not making them pass mathematics. It is high time that learners are given few subjects only so that they can focus on their studies.Salomon IM KanguluBy e-mail