Questions teachers, parents often ask
MM, do you think our teaching force, in very general terms, is the best for our children and schools in Zimbabwe? Are they trained enough, qualified enough and competent enough to be agents of the change needed in our education and country? Consider how many students fail exams each year. Be honest with your answer sir.
I’m a worried parent -New Bordervale-Mutare. Call me TCM.
ANSWER: Dear TCM
Allow me to use my practical criticism skills to unlock your short pregnant text and questions.
Your question(s) create an obvious tone of doubt about the competence of our teaching force in general. The mood is one of gloom and doom as evidenced by your concern over the pass rate. You appeal for my honesty but clearly honesty to you means agreeing with your sentiments. I will be honest though.
We have the best teachers there can be in this country. Whether they are the best of the best or not, that is clearly something else. It is important to realize that whatever is wrong or not very encouraging about these teachers, nothing is of their own make. We cannot blame them. Unless we don’t understand the system of education!
Teachers in the majority of cases are no more finding themselves in Education training colleges by choice or calling. They are responding to economic hardships and reality of serious unemployment. Most of them are not only not- teachers at heart, but also in the lungs, the kidneys and liver…whatever! Nothing speaks a teacher on or about many of them. They are people finding themselves in a place they do not want to be and have no idea why they are.
Teachers do not decide what and how to teach. Their work is organized and planned for them. Even the plans they make in their plan-books and scheme books are not their own fresh or virgin plans. They plan what was planned for them in offices very far from their schools.
Teachers are not decision makers. They implement policy. They take orders. They are foot soldiers of an army commanded from another planet where they have never been; commanders they don’t know well and have never talked to or with, but nervously listened to. Teachers do not analyse and comment on the curriculum or syllabi. However, they are supposed to be virile enough to make a woman or wife who was chosen for them and given them pregnant. They do not know the wife very well, perhaps don’t even love her or like her much, but must make her have children. And no one can argue the products of such a rape-case union are not unwanted children.
Teachers in the education training colleges are very intelligent and gifted but are perhaps not the sharpest or smartest brains on the market. The best brains available go to university to pursue Medicine, Law, Engineering Robotic and Actuarial Sciences. Many of teachers in training are mere C streamers, average ‘O’ and ‘A’ level students who sat several examinations and scratched a low pass before heaving a huge sigh of relief. How can they create distinction students in schools, coming as they do from a very mediocre academic background?
Most of these teachers are at a teacher’s college to enjoy a brief breakfast meal, their lunch and dinner meals spent in a school somewhere beyond the sticks of Zimbabwe on what is often a confusion of teaching practice and practice teaching. They are not teachers…yet, but are. They do most of the teaching here and make most schools tick in sporting and club activities.
Some of them are heads of departments. They do most of the work while the ‘qualified’ teacher is the whole day engrossed on WhatsApp or gossips with the Grade 4 or Form 4 teacher in the corridor or staff room if the school is lucky enough to have these. Many find comfort to do this under trees.
Mr TCM, I could go on and on until tomorrow. None of these challenges, gaps or loopholes is of the teacher’s making. They are victims of a long poisoned education system, unsure of its mission and vision of outcome; an education product without a best-before and expiry date, but left to us by a racist and unfriendly colonial system of education interested in a white education good for themselves and a few lucky black Africans; a regime that knew by the time they were down and out, the education product would have expired.
It is my honest hope that the advent of the new curriculum will carefully, intelligently and democratically address the imperfections of a system blamed on the teachers and not it.
My only serious reservation and worry about the teachers are teachers who under this same situation and reality, continue to be intellectually arrogant and self-satisfied; refusing to learn as they teach. That attitude in my honest opinion is self defeating, primitive and counter-productive.