YOUNG PROFESSIONALS AS THE NEW DEPED TEACHERS

Teaching is considered to be the noblest profession of all; there will be no doctors, engineers, businessmen, and other professionals without their teachers. Truly, many people look up to teachers because of the prestige they carry along with their names. These teachers are expected to be all-knowing, decent, dynamic, talented, and the like. In a nutshell, teachers are expected to be “perfect” at all times in school or outside the campus, although these ideal characteristics are not usually met, but still it should be near the expectation at least.

The Department of Education (DepEd) has been hiring 74,886 teachers only for this school year 2018-2019 according to Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno as to address the lack of teachers in public schools. Hence, millennials, which are born in the year 1981-1996, are now rendering and will render service in the department even at their early twenties. Many individuals express their sentiments about the new wave of teachers. Others would see this positively but most would see it as disadvantageous.

According to some observations, young teachers are described to be easygo-lucky. They tend to be relaxed even if the situation demanded to get urgent. In fact, they keep on complaining on tasks that have been given. Also, they are demanding for a fair workload, and compare theirs with the seniors’ duties. Moreover, the feedback to the young teachers, in general, is that they get too attached with their students. This attachment breaks the boundary of the student-teacher relationship norm. Evidently, when the boundary of teachers and students collapsed, it would trigger to a more serious problem – the lack of respect. Thus, this eventually might cause a domino effect on the actual teaching-learning process.

Although these claims and observations might just be hypothetical and cannot be generalized to all young millennial teachers, but still, this has something to be addressed and to look on.

On contrary, other people would consider young teachers as advantageous, since millennials are more computer literate, approachable, creative, and innovative, which perfectly suit in what the 21st Century Learning wanted. In fact, these teachers have surely met the qualifications of a full-fledged professional teacher, thus no doubt that they are effective, efficient, and competent. Furthermore, these millennials are said to have an imaginary connection which students could really relate to, thus, it makes learning fun and more enjoyable. It is a mile different from the traditional strategies and approaches that other old teachers practice.

Young teachers are not seen to be the problem per se. This does not aim to compare which teacher generation is better. The differences might just be of the varying principles the young and old teachers adhere. We cannot deny the fact that generation gap is present among the teachers in all the schools, we might not understand why one does a thing but it is definitely linked to his/her principles.

At the end of the day, the main duty of a teacher, regardless of the generation he/she belongs, is to teach, touch and transform the learners. And once this has been fulfilled, the teacher can be considered as successful.

--oOo— The author is Head Teacher III at Sta. Monica High School