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Thursday, June 24, 2010

to teach?

These are not my words. I agree with SOME of the points, not all. I'm posting this up because to a large extent, the author of this piece of work has accurately depicted the job scope in a few words and pointers. Again, these are NOT my words. (I've got to emphasis it for the people who think otherwise, you see)

” Hi, I’m a teacher.

We’ve had everything in our profession. It’s a fantastic job.

We’re administrative clerks collecting money, sorting forms, doing filing, drafting letters, photocopying, etc.

We’re professional readers and decoders, able to read tonnes of scripts filled with grammatical errors and yet understand them.

We’re editors, we’re able to convert pieces of work filled with errors till they’re perfect.

We’re professional nannies, taking care of students during camps and other events.

We’re great planners and crisis managers, given all sudden projects, crisis like SARS, we can finish teaching our syllabus within time frame.

We’re graphic designers cum contractors, doing classroom decorations, planning events for major national education days like Racial Harmony Day etc., school anniversary, VIP visit, setting up stalls to carry out activities or sell stuffs.

We’re customer service officers, serving parents and students at 24 x 7, some even provide handphone number. We cover the communications for mistakes made by our “company”.

We’re finance managers, we plan our budget for CCA, events we’re in charge of, work within budget and make sure transaction involving students are well taken care of.

We’re purchasers, we speak to contractors, carpenters, drama companies, musical groups to negotiate deals, etc. We travel all over Singapore to look for good deals so that it matches our budget.

We’re managers, we manage a bunch of students to excel in their work and parents to let them have faith in our “company”.

We’re slaves, listening to HODs and principal, getting rejections and approvals day-in, day-out.

We’re free labour, always there when other colleagues are not available, relieving or running errands for HODs, replacing them to attend conferences, etc.

We’re students, attending minimum of 100 training hours learning something most of us already knew.

We’re software engineers, having e-learning to add to our workload by overseeing their online progress, their blogs, filtering good content for students.

We’re creative directors, thinking of new ways to teach, attending students’ external courses so as to learn to use the materials.

We’re manufacturers, creating teaching and learning materials from cardboards, papers, etc printing with our own colour printers.

We’re sales personnel, having targets to meet in terms of students’ results, number of major contributions to schools, sharing at conferences, conducting our own training in our own school or cluster to fellow professionals. If we don’t meet our target, we get skewed like sales men.

We’re professional cleaners, cleaning up our premises, CCA venues and classrooms before the VIP’s arrival.

Most importantly, we’re teachers and we impart what we know in content and values.

If you truly know what AEDs are allowed to do, you’ll probably know they do not lessen our workload much. Some actually added to our workload, having us to supervise them along the way.

Teaching is definitely not the worst job in civil service. We’re not asking for attention, just appreciation.

Most of us stay because we love our colleagues or the students or in some cases, both. We love our job and we’re not complaining.

We just don’t want to be misunderstood. It’s myopic to think that our job is about marking, lesson planning and kids’ problems, extremely myopic.

I don’t talk bad about other professions as I don’t understand them fully. Nor do I see the need to or harbour any tinge of jealousy over their entitlements.

Those above are just some examples of what we do.

For more information, quench your curiosity and join teaching.