Star Q
The statement made by Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh saying that only one third out of the 61,000 teachers teaching English is qualified to teach the subject, did not really come as a great shock to me. If anything, it came a little bit too late considering the fact that the number of teachers teaching English has reached 61,000.
It has taken the Education Ministry this long to realise the seriousness of this situation, so much so that it has immediately taken actions, through leaps and bounds to ensure that these teachers will be able to teach English well. After the compulsory CPT test which was done rather hurriedly last year, a large number of the English teacher community has been called to attend courses. The intentions of the Ministry to equip these teachers with tools that they may use in the teaching of English is lauded. However, the time allocated for these teachers to attend these courses after school hours is, to say the least, ludicrous!
Once again, I must stress that although the people-who-know-everything think that teaching is an easy job and that after school hours they can be asked (forced!) to attend courses, seminars or what-have-yous under the sun, the reality is far from it. Teaching at least 120 students a day is a taxing endeavour, both on the stamina and emotions. Teachers would need to spend what ever minutes that is left after school hours to mark students' exercises, to make teaching aids and to create and design resource materials which includes worksheets and handouts.
Furthermore, in the process of creating these aids and resources, teachers would need to scour through the internet, books, newspapers or magazines, searching for suitable materials and then adopting or adapting them to cater to their students' proficiency levels. After searching for materials, teachers would then need to design enough activities or tasks that would fill the number of minutes allocated in the timetable, be it a single or a double period.
In addition to all this, teachers would also need to design tasks that are, not only suitable to their students' proficiency levels, but varied enough to cover the spectrum under the English syllabus, like the four skills and the use of English Language focusing on areas like Vocabulary and Grammar for example, which includes choosing the specific language items and tasks and activities through which they can be taught.
After all this, one can hardly expect a normal human being, let alone teachers as described above, to happily attend courses and seminars until 6.00 in the evening. And as if all this is not enough, they are also expected to happily return to school the next day and continue teaching, armed to the teeth with resources, which they would probably not be able to prepare due to valuable time spent attending the course!
And finally, I am sure the people-who-know-everything don't really care about the fact that teachers start work at 7.30 a.m. (even though they have to clock in at as early as 7.00 a.m.) and having them to attend courses until 6.00 p.m. would mean an 11-hour working day - with no break in between, because teachers do not have that one hour lunch break that other civil servants working in offices do!
After all that has been said, at the end of the day, teachers fall back on the Malay saying (literally translated): we are cucumbers, they are durians. If we roll on them we get hurt, if they roll on us we get hurt too; either way we lose (in a way!)
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