Home » SAT mag » Teaching: Job Or Profession?

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by Vijaya Jayasuriya

A staggering number of cases were reported in the media of late where teachers had misused their August capacity of moulding the future generation by resorting to mean tactics as punishment to students. This is indeed an index of what lowly levels this once respectable position has crumbled into in spite of billions of public funds spent for the maintenance of a good standard in teaching, mainly teachers’ salary-wise. (A mere trained teacher today gets almost treble my salary as a DDE with a masters in teacher education barely a decade ago!)

Although often taken very lightly, teaching is a task carrying with it the tremendous responsibility of creating a society with wholesome attitudes for a country. So much so that hundreds of undesirable elements that almost daily wreak havoc as criminals are the products of faulty teaching in schools where the profound task of a teacher has been misinterpreted as a mere ‘job’ needing only some basic physical skills and not the one requiring a wealth of advanced learning and a proper training. A job is merely one that calls for a very restricted handful of mostly physical skills that for example a mason or a barber requires to carry on his work whereas a profession is essentially based on a thorough mastery of a gamut of advanced learning gained in a well-planned course of study in a training institution set apart for it or in a university.

This is exactly why a large number of teacher training colleges and their more recent counterparts called Colleges of Education are created whose task is to produce a professional with a comprehensive knowledge of the science and art of the work undertaken. It is when this sophisticated process falls through by any chance that teaching becomes a mere job, utilizing only the physical skill of talking maintained with a little subject knowledge thus giving rise to the misconception of ‘teaching is talking’ jettisoning the more professional aspect of the practice like anathema.

This serious deterioration of the professionalism in teaching has reduced the classroom into a ‘chalk and talk’ business where the teacher would go on talking with little concern as to whether what is ‘taught’ is at all internalized by the student or just went over their heads, the latter being the general trend prevailing in most of our classrooms today. Teachers being merely satisfied with pouring forth without bothering to ensure that students grasp. What is taught has become the order of the day in our pedagogic sphere. This fact is born out annually (or at least once in a blue moon) by the almost incredible phenomenon of nearly, 50 p.c. of students sitting ‘O’ levels in a rural school with the least infrastructural facilities getting credit passes in an alien subject like English while not even half of this kind of achievement is witnessed in most highly prestigious city schools with all imaginable facilities and teachers with lengthy experience.

Bungling in teaching is a crime far more disastrous and extensive than the outcome of a rare mistake by a doctor or a lawyer as a teacher’s task throughout her whole career involves the destiny of thousands of students. Though there are individual disparities in students’ learning capacity depending on various unavoidable factors like the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) levels, it is largely the teachers’ cleverness that ultimately determine the number of failures in a class.

The Areas of Mastery

There are two major areas of mastery that a good teacher boasts: educational psychology and teaching methodology. Although every course of teacher education compulsorily encompass these extremely vital areas of knowledge for teachers to master, it is a pity, and has also turned out to be a farcical irony that very few of the practitioners – less than 10 P.C. in my experience in the field – practically display at least any awareness of these disciplines! Small wonder therefore that large numbers of students flunk ‘O’ levels annually thus expanding the numbers with a propensity to take to the underworld that requires no scholastic training as such.

It is educational psychology that inculcates in teachers the theories of child development, their emotional, social and intellectual maturity which crucially determine the child’s learning capacity. A maladjusted child, for example cannot have an inclination for academic learning as his is a character greatly disturbed by a mentality marked by an emotional imbalance having been brought up in a ‘problem home’. This kind of an unfortunate child does not get any guidance form a teacher without a proper training in psychology and invariably, gets neglected in the class ultimately making his whole schooling career an utter flop, being unable to face any of the exams.

A knowledge and training in educational psychology equips a teacher to handle ‘problem children’ as it were properly and bring them to the correct track so that they are compelled to learn what is taught. Thus fulfilling of students’ psychological needs is carried out by a good teacher by being conscious about and also considerate of their particular problems individually. This kind of conscientious attitude on the part of a teacher calls for a particularly devoted nature in her, which unfortunately happens to be at a premium in our teaching profession, rendering the school a wholy miserable place for students with this kind of special needs.

This phenomenon of ‘problem children’ is getting more and more complicated with the fast deteriorating social conditions available today making the teachers’ task all the more challenging and the students’ lot more unfortunate and more or less irreversible unless by any chance the particular class of students happen to be taken over by a capable teacher when going into upper grades.

Teaching Methodology

Apart from the mastery of educational psychology, a thorough training in the subject of teaching methodology is also essential for a teacher to do her service effectively. A good course in methodology gives a teacher a knowledge and practice of how teaching of any subject can be carried out without abandoning students in bewilderment by not understanding whatever is taught.

Teaching is not just one way delivery of a speech by the teacher as many appear to believe, but a process of reciprocation as it were, a continuous exchange of questions and answers. In this particular process the teacher keeps expressing ideas each of which is followed by questions which is called ‘checking understanding’. (Lecturing to a large number of students as in the university is a different kettle of fish altogether, as they are an intelligent lot who have already mastered the art of understanding merely by listening to the speaker.

Unlike in a humdrum one-way delivery the consistent questioning by the teacher has two main advantages: one, the teacher can make sure that her charges have really grasped what she has already taught and two-students are perforce compelled to stick to the task at hand without engaging in irrelevant thinking or just idling in pursuit of their own whims. Practised thoroughly right from their early grades this kind of methodology ensures the proper grasp of what is taught by the teacher without the usual waste of energies on the part of both the teacher and the learner. The process however has its own complexities as to how complications inherent in it can be tackled by the teacher and a gamut of these are normally practised in a proper course of training course of training handled by experienced trainers in practice teaching sessions etc.

In the teaching of English this dialogue between the teacher and the students comes even more useful as it helps promote the valuable oral skills – the speaking of English, which no other form of practice like drilling of structures which is mostly suitable for beginning classes can achieve effectively. Our students cannot utter a world of English even after several years of learning it because teachers only pursue the ‘one way’ process without resorting to this exchange of language in teaching.

Students fail in exams in their thousands because the foregoing mode of proper teaching is hardly practised in schools and teachers only engage, in a very convenient ‘one-way delivery’ with the least concern whether the recipients of their ‘teacher talk’, have grasped what has been ‘taught’. While the very impressive time tables of most of our teacher training institutions display subjects like educational psychology and teaching in these hardly take place nowadays following a sordid plummeting of standards for the past several decades. Little learned supervision and guidance prevail in these places (as our students in teacher education who are now lecturers there claims) to ensure the proper execution of the course work as planned and this is mainly due to lack of professionals in keep positions with suitable achievement of the qualifications required.

As I have already reiterated earlier in these columns, lack of proper supervision by officials (eg. Subject directors) attached to education offices also contribute greatly to this pathetic state of affairs prevailing in our school system while principals hardly supervise classroom teaching and only keep carrying out the official duties entrusted to them almost tantamount to those handled by a chief clerk in an office, while only a fraction of good ones perform their role conscientiously making at least this amount of exam results possible.

For any improvement of this sordid situation, sanity should prevail and true professionals should be given responsibilities both in the spheres of training and administration doing away with the domination of the field by mere admin bigwigs who are entrusted with determining the destiny of a field for beyond their reach.

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Home » SAT mag » Teaching: Job Or Profession?

article_image

by Vijaya Jayasuriya

A staggering number of cases were reported in the media of late where teachers had misused their August capacity of moulding the future generation by resorting to mean tactics as punishment to students. This is indeed an index of what lowly levels this once respectable position has crumbled into in spite of billions of public funds spent for the maintenance of a good standard in teaching, mainly teachers’ salary-wise. (A mere trained teacher today gets almost treble my salary as a DDE with a masters in teacher education barely a decade ago!)

Although often taken very lightly, teaching is a task carrying with it the tremendous responsibility of creating a society with wholesome attitudes for a country. So much so that hundreds of undesirable elements that almost daily wreak havoc as criminals are the products of faulty teaching in schools where the profound task of a teacher has been misinterpreted as a mere ‘job’ needing only some basic physical skills and not the one requiring a wealth of advanced learning and a proper training. A job is merely one that calls for a very restricted handful of mostly physical skills that for example a mason or a barber requires to carry on his work whereas a profession is essentially based on a thorough mastery of a gamut of advanced learning gained in a well-planned course of study in a training institution set apart for it or in a university.

This is exactly why a large number of teacher training colleges and their more recent counterparts called Colleges of Education are created whose task is to produce a professional with a comprehensive knowledge of the science and art of the work undertaken. It is when this sophisticated process falls through by any chance that teaching becomes a mere job, utilizing only the physical skill of talking maintained with a little subject knowledge thus giving rise to the misconception of ‘teaching is talking’ jettisoning the more professional aspect of the practice like anathema.

This serious deterioration of the professionalism in teaching has reduced the classroom into a ‘chalk and talk’ business where the teacher would go on talking with little concern as to whether what is ‘taught’ is at all internalized by the student or just went over their heads, the latter being the general trend prevailing in most of our classrooms today. Teachers being merely satisfied with pouring forth without bothering to ensure that students grasp. What is taught has become the order of the day in our pedagogic sphere. This fact is born out annually (or at least once in a blue moon) by the almost incredible phenomenon of nearly, 50 p.c. of students sitting ‘O’ levels in a rural school with the least infrastructural facilities getting credit passes in an alien subject like English while not even half of this kind of achievement is witnessed in most highly prestigious city schools with all imaginable facilities and teachers with lengthy experience.

Bungling in teaching is a crime far more disastrous and extensive than the outcome of a rare mistake by a doctor or a lawyer as a teacher’s task throughout her whole career involves the destiny of thousands of students. Though there are individual disparities in students’ learning capacity depending on various unavoidable factors like the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) levels, it is largely the teachers’ cleverness that ultimately determine the number of failures in a class.

The Areas of Mastery

There are two major areas of mastery that a good teacher boasts: educational psychology and teaching methodology. Although every course of teacher education compulsorily encompass these extremely vital areas of knowledge for teachers to master, it is a pity, and has also turned out to be a farcical irony that very few of the practitioners – less than 10 P.C. in my experience in the field – practically display at least any awareness of these disciplines! Small wonder therefore that large numbers of students flunk ‘O’ levels annually thus expanding the numbers with a propensity to take to the underworld that requires no scholastic training as such.

It is educational psychology that inculcates in teachers the theories of child development, their emotional, social and intellectual maturity which crucially determine the child’s learning capacity. A maladjusted child, for example cannot have an inclination for academic learning as his is a character greatly disturbed by a mentality marked by an emotional imbalance having been brought up in a ‘problem home’. This kind of an unfortunate child does not get any guidance form a teacher without a proper training in psychology and invariably, gets neglected in the class ultimately making his whole schooling career an utter flop, being unable to face any of the exams.

A knowledge and training in educational psychology equips a teacher to handle ‘problem children’ as it were properly and bring them to the correct track so that they are compelled to learn what is taught. Thus fulfilling of students’ psychological needs is carried out by a good teacher by being conscious about and also considerate of their particular problems individually. This kind of conscientious attitude on the part of a teacher calls for a particularly devoted nature in her, which unfortunately happens to be at a premium in our teaching profession, rendering the school a wholy miserable place for students with this kind of special needs.

This phenomenon of ‘problem children’ is getting more and more complicated with the fast deteriorating social conditions available today making the teachers’ task all the more challenging and the students’ lot more unfortunate and more or less irreversible unless by any chance the particular class of students happen to be taken over by a capable teacher when going into upper grades.

Teaching Methodology

Apart from the mastery of educational psychology, a thorough training in the subject of teaching methodology is also essential for a teacher to do her service effectively. A good course in methodology gives a teacher a knowledge and practice of how teaching of any subject can be carried out without abandoning students in bewilderment by not understanding whatever is taught.

Teaching is not just one way delivery of a speech by the teacher as many appear to believe, but a process of reciprocation as it were, a continuous exchange of questions and answers. In this particular process the teacher keeps expressing ideas each of which is followed by questions which is called ‘checking understanding’. (Lecturing to a large number of students as in the university is a different kettle of fish altogether, as they are an intelligent lot who have already mastered the art of understanding merely by listening to the speaker.

Unlike in a humdrum one-way delivery the consistent questioning by the teacher has two main advantages: one, the teacher can make sure that her charges have really grasped what she has already taught and two-students are perforce compelled to stick to the task at hand without engaging in irrelevant thinking or just idling in pursuit of their own whims. Practised thoroughly right from their early grades this kind of methodology ensures the proper grasp of what is taught by the teacher without the usual waste of energies on the part of both the teacher and the learner. The process however has its own complexities as to how complications inherent in it can be tackled by the teacher and a gamut of these are normally practised in a proper course of training course of training handled by experienced trainers in practice teaching sessions etc.

In the teaching of English this dialogue between the teacher and the students comes even more useful as it helps promote the valuable oral skills – the speaking of English, which no other form of practice like drilling of structures which is mostly suitable for beginning classes can achieve effectively. Our students cannot utter a world of English even after several years of learning it because teachers only pursue the ‘one way’ process without resorting to this exchange of language in teaching.

Students fail in exams in their thousands because the foregoing mode of proper teaching is hardly practised in schools and teachers only engage, in a very convenient ‘one-way delivery’ with the least concern whether the recipients of their ‘teacher talk’, have grasped what has been ‘taught’. While the very impressive time tables of most of our teacher training institutions display subjects like educational psychology and teaching in these hardly take place nowadays following a sordid plummeting of standards for the past several decades. Little learned supervision and guidance prevail in these places (as our students in teacher education who are now lecturers there claims) to ensure the proper execution of the course work as planned and this is mainly due to lack of professionals in keep positions with suitable achievement of the qualifications required.

As I have already reiterated earlier in these columns, lack of proper supervision by officials (eg. Subject directors) attached to education offices also contribute greatly to this pathetic state of affairs prevailing in our school system while principals hardly supervise classroom teaching and only keep carrying out the official duties entrusted to them almost tantamount to those handled by a chief clerk in an office, while only a fraction of good ones perform their role conscientiously making at least this amount of exam results possible.

For any improvement of this sordid situation, sanity should prevail and true professionals should be given responsibilities both in the spheres of training and administration doing away with the domination of the field by mere admin bigwigs who are entrusted with determining the destiny of a field for beyond their reach.

 Hits: 74     Send to Friend


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