Challenges of SA Educators

The knots above their eyebrows became tighter as they frantically looked through their packed calender to find another suitable date for us.

“You must find a date for us before the final submission on the 31st Oct, and make sure that the things that we talked about are in the final portfolio. There can only be one result and that's for us to succeed!” My co-colleague, Thami pressured the educators from Pheta Primary School again.

This would never be a scene that you will see in Singapore. Let me put it into context for you. Imagine you are writing a report or doing up a portfolio for the MOE NE Award, and the people from Singapore Discovery Centre not only demands that you make time for them during your lessons, present your portfolio to be critically assessed by them and you will also be pressured to be on your toes to complete tasks and guidelines given. I cannot imagine our Singaporeans teachers humbly appreciating this gesture, we just have too much pride.

Many schools here apply for the Eco-School award, do a lot of school improvements, but fail to give themselves a pat on their back due to their lack of interest or capability to put together a portfolio. Our job is to guide the educators to put together this portfolio. There is a lot of communication and hand holding to help the educators in this process over the year, from workshops to one-to-one sessions. I feel that it is a meaningful additional gesture by SANParks to help the community. Being with so many schools in SANParks, it is obvious that there is a great gap between the quality of education in different schools, especially between the private schools in the urban areas VS the public schools in rural and poor areas. And hopefully through simple gestures like these, it could help to expose the educators in more rural areas.

My co-colleague has this genuine interest to help the schools to achieve, especially for Pheta Primary School. She had seen a lot of improvements in the rural school, but was concerned when I feedback about the lack of content in their portfolio to her (based on what i had observed during the eco-school meeting). And thus she was really adding pressure on the team of teachers. I could fully understand where she was coming from, but my heart also went out to the educators.

Let me bring you back to the first scene where the educators are frantically searching for dates in their calendar while my colleague added verbal pressure. The Principal was standing behind and looking over their shoulders while the Deputy Principal sat beside them with equally tight-knotted brows. It was the 7th of Oct, exams are around the corner, and there was a list of more than 10 items for improvement on our notes.

Is the disease for awards spreading in this globalising world? I do agree that awards help to boost the morale of the school, educators and learners, it is also an effective guideline for the school to check that their systems are in place. However, it can also be equally demoralising for the unprepared educator.

One thing that is for sure, the educators here are also not having an easy time. As quoted from a South African teacher, Parween Khan, in response to people who comment how lucky teachers are to have a half-day job and have four holidays in a year, “Frankly this is a simplistic view and I have come very close to committing murder in response to this comment. So often have I heard this inane and uninformed statement, spoken in a patronising, holier-than-thou tone – and by so many different people – that it is just by the grace of God that I have not become a serial killer!” (“Setting Things Straight”, The Teacher, Sept 08)

Take a peak into the lives of an educator from an urban area -not only do they work long hours and write long reports, they are often also potential victims of violence. Items such as screwdrivers, penknives and the occasional gun can be items found during random searches. Not to mention having to deal with the many other problems such as teenage pregnancy/AIDs/discrimination/poverty of such Mt Everest magnitudes that sometimes make us look silly when we always have so much to complain on our little Bukit Timah Hill.

I agree that back home we are really working very hard and sometimes we multi-task so much that we burnout or forget our duty as classroom teachers. But we also do get world class training and support (in terms of funds and facilities). And really, looking at what the educators have to deal with over here, I feel that we need to just stop complaining, appreciate what we have, and just start acting. Let us manage the system and not let the system manage us.