Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A School's Product : Teachers or Students?

Star Q


When people talk about school, they generally think about what their children do there, what they learn and what they hope their children would achieve.  In short the product of a school should ideally be the students!  They never think about what the teachers should do because as far as they are concerned, they know the core business of teachers, and that is to teach their children; or so they think!

But with the advent of time, I seem to notice an unhealthy shift of focus from what should be the training and learning ground for students to evolve into respectable individuals, the school has now been transformed into a mini teachers' college, training teachers to be more than what they should be.  

Instead of focusing on students' academic performance like having extra classes for students (not merely once a week!), teachers are being asked to focus more on themselves by doing things other than teaching, like reading at least two books per year and presenting a book report to the rest of the staff.  Teachers are also asked to conduct religious talks at every opportunity the school can get them to do so.  Not that that's a bad thing, but if it causes the teacher to focus on it more than teaching, then it is.  Teachers are also asked to run countless other programs that has nothing to do with improving students academic performance.  

And we all know that even though the government wants all schools to be less academic oriented, at the end of the day academic excellence is what all of us look for; be they the students, parents, society, teachers and the government itself!

By getting teachers to do all these things that have nothing to do with the improvement of students' academic performance, many of the programs that do relate to it is, unfortunately sidelined.  As I recall, there used to be three extra classes per week and a few years ago, it went down to twice a week.  Sad to say, the extra classes have been demoted to only once a week nowadays!  It is hard to imagine, extra classes for an important subject like Additional Mathematics comes down to only twice in six months!  And you wonder why the results have been anything but exemplary!  

Another obvious indication that the school is not paying attention to academic excellence of it's students is that for about four years now there has never been any awards giving ceremony for excellent students.  This ceremony used to be organised and carried out annually honoring students not only excellent in academics but also in co-curricular activities.  However, for the past two years only excellence in co-curricular activities have been awarded.  And the real shocker is there is even a co-curricular award of excellence for 'Permainan Batu Seremban' played at school level!  What's even more surprising about all this brouhaha over co-curricular activities is that it only contributes 10% to a student's overall performance!

It is already February.  There is still time to change.  Parents everywhere are hoping and praying hard that things will change for the better at least where their children are concerned.  Let the teachers do what they are supposed to do; teach!  Don't suck them out of their energy to teach during classes and extra classes just so they can be scapegoats in the attempt to fulfill an ambitious dream that is not theirs to begin with!

In God's name, change before it is too late!


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