I run an educational service providing organization and we don’t just train students, we also train teachers. In the past few months as I carry out market research to know and understand the pain point of Teachers, I found the most outstanding issues. For this post, I am shinning my light on the fact that about 60% of the teachers I know chose teaching as a last resort, they had searched for jobs for months, years and because they couldn’t find, they chose to teach. Some even still live with the hope that they will get a better job.
It never fail to amaze me why such a job with intellectual demand will be treated with levity. I have had the experience of teaching before and I can tell you for one that that job is for supernatural people.
Do you know what it means to
communicate an idea to let’s say 30 people at once and at least 80% of the class gets the point. Can you imagine the Emotional coordination it takes for a teacher who has family issues to come to class the next day to teach? How emotionally intelligent a teacher is attending to different students from different background, different learning pace and learning languages?, can you relate with the psychology of the process of teaching?
The very interesting part of this job is that even when you leave the school environment to your house, your minds is still on matters that concerns your job like; writing lesson notes, probably marking scripts, recording scores or thinking of how to meet up with scheme of work for the term, reflecting on what and what has not being taught for the term or semester. When people do not pass your exam, you are bothered, when people pass too much, you are bothered. I can go on and on.
The system created to the government has put us in a place to blame them. When from 1960-1977, the government policy for education gave room to school certificate holders to be teachers. They threw such a highly sensitive job into the dirt for people without experience and exposure to handle. Even today, what do we have? To be qualified as a teacher just have NCE and you are good to go. The funny thing is that the later was actually the method set in place by the ministry of education to better the system. What short sightedness!
We can blame the government as much as we like but I think we have also contributed in ensuring that such a highly sensitive job as teaching is treated with less seriousness. How? You may ask. Well, for every time you tell someone who just graduated to get a teaching job just to hold up for the main time till something better comes along. For every time someone says am a teacher and you do not take the person seriously because you feel that is not one of the high paying jobs in Nigeria today. Except for those who have stepped up their hustle or those who lecture in tertiary institutions, I do not think any family can survive on the salary of a teaching job.
The many sidedness of teaching in this part of the worlds has being neglected. There are schools were for a whole year, the Teachers do not undertake any form of Trainings, the school does not even care about the welfare of their staffs, all they care is come and teach and go.
As an organization we are developing methods and strategies to correct this very myopic view of the teaching profession. God helping us, in time when our plans to influence policies starts unfolding, teaching should be one of the hardest job to get, one of the most desirable job also in the country because of its high paying rate.
Am also taking this time out to celebrate my Mathematics teacher back in secondary school. This woman will fix extra classes on Saturdays and Sundays, at the time, she had 4 children if I remember correctly. She will also fix 7am classes for us in SS3 some days of the week, so we can go through some topics before assembly starts. One day I was standing on the balcony of my class and I saw this woman coming with her children and I thought to myself; how does she even do it? Bath all the children, then dress them up, then feed them and she still comes earlier than normal. She did all this not because she was being paid extra for the job, NO! it was out of the deep passion that we us not fail the west afrocan secondary school examinatoion (WASSCE), and she wanted us to know that Mathematics is easy it only takes a lot of practice. Well I guess it paid off because I had a C which I would have never gotten if not for all that effort.
She is my ideal teacher when I say that teaching is not for lazy people.
You reading this right now, if you have someone who you know to fit into this category go ahead and tell their story so the world will know that teaching is not for lazy people.