On education in 1984-ville

So we had a long talk about what's so wrong about sending kids to public schools in 1984-ville.

My reflections on the problem from a teacher's POV. Talk to any teacher in a local public school and top gripe he or she has is the lack of a defined job scope.

Strange.



Teacher = teach? No?

Apparently not. At least in the eyes of government officials. You would think that the primary job descriptors for teachers are:

(i) Plan lessons
(ii) Deliver lessons
(iii) Assess effectiveness of learning
(iv) Evaluate effectivness of teaching

On average, I step into the classroom for 3 hours a day. That's what it says in my time-table. From experience, I need 2 hours of preparation work (i.e. lesson planning) for every hour of class. That excludes setting and marking assessments as well as coaching weaker students outside of time-table, which probably takes up about an hour a day. There are "peak" periods, especially during exam season. But on the average, I would need to spend about 3 (lesson) + 6 (planning) + 1 (marking & coaching) = 10 hours a day to be an effective teacher. That's 2 hour more than a normal working day.

But on paper, administrators see only the lesson hours (3 hours/day for me). And light bulbs flash in their heads.

Oh, only 3 hours of teaching a day! Wow, that's great. Teachers have at least 5 hours free to do non-teaching projects, sit in committees etc.

Hence you get a blurring of job scopes. It's no longer teaching. It's teaching + other stuff.

Let's see what I've done this year that's not teaching:

1. Organizing an international competition (2 meetings a week & an hour of organization work a day for 3 months)

2. Sitting in a committee overseeing school canteen operations (Monthly inspections + stallholder liaison + administration work)

3. Liaison with government department for coordinating of student research projects on a national level for the past nine months (an hour of e-mail work per week + monthly meetings).

4. Training students for academic competitions (an hour a fortnight).

5. Hosting foreign visitors (ad-hoc basis, but basically I'm on call 24/7 for the duration of their visit).

You know, there's a saying that you hire the right person for the job. Generally you'd want to hire someone qualified or experienced in doing something. So a fireman fights a fire, a gardener tends the garden, a teacher teaches, a banker banks etc. So why are school administrators hiring teachers to be event managers, adminstrators, trainers, hosts, operations managers etc when it says on my name card "Teacher"?