Teachers in Singapore recently got a huge chip off the shoulder, as statistics proving just how gruelling their profession is emerged into the mainstream.
Often overworked and underappreciated, teachers have one of the most stressful jobs in the country, and it’s no surprise that there’s been an increase in resignation rates over the last five years. Despite optimistic sentiments expressed by the Ministry of Education (Hey guys, it’s all good! Totally normal!), ex-teachers interviewed by The Straits Times painted a different picture. Long working hours, increased administrative workload, lowered priorities on actually teaching — all of which have been warding off passionate educators from the service.
But all the issues brought up in the reports only touch the surface, and one former teacher has tasked his/herself to explain what’s actually going wrong in the organisation, based on personal experience.
In a blogpost titled Non Erudiam (‘Do Not Teach’ in Latin, according to Google Translate), the former teacher goes on at length to opine what the Ministry of Education desperately needs to fix to retain its teaching staff. Check out some highlights from the illuminating post below, and read the whole thing here:
On the need to have a proper Teacher’s Union
“Personally, I think teachers need access to an independent third-party who can evaluate comments/criticism, like an ombudsman or a union rep. I mean, technically speaking there is a Teacher’s Union, but I’m not sure what they’ve ever done for me except organise SDU-style “meet more singles!” events that I never attended.
If such a system is already in place, I’ve never encountered it. This could very well be because my organisational awareness was super-bad (at least, that’s what my work review always said), but perhaps also because such channels weren’t advertised, or didn’t appear credible.”
On how teachers receive wrong postings
“On a side-note, and a somewhat personal note, I’ve also observed that teachers tend to be happier when they’re teaching the subjects they signed on to teach. What’s awful is that some of them don’t. It sounds crazy that sometimes we hire teachers who’re skilled in A and then force them to devote their time to B, but it happens way more than is conscionable.
The organisation often claims expedience and exigency: essentially, that something desperately needs doing and so people get crammed into the role.”
On the mistake of throwing more money to make teachers happy
“The general assumption seems to be that talented individuals are willing to overlook any amount if dissatisfaction if you throw enough money at them. This general assumption may very well break down when applied to an industry that nobody joins for the sake of profit. When was the last time you heard anyone wanted to become a teacher to get rich? Yeah. I thought so.
Granted, some people leave teaching to become private tutors, and yes, the money is a lot better. If MOE paid me a private tutor’s rate, I would have earned something like $20,000++ a month. But what’s the causal relationship here? Do teachers become tutors because the money is better, or do they become tutors because first and foremost of better hours/job-scope/workload/satisfaction, with the higher pay being a bonus? I would wager that the latter tends to ring more true: even if I had left teaching to pursue full-time tuition, I wouldn’t have kept the same hours and earned more: instead, I would have tried to reduce my workload/improve my focus on teaching, while at the same time seeking to maintain (instead of radically increase) my income.”
On the admin workload problem
“I spent far more time on organisation-related tasks than student-related ones, and at around the midpoint of my teaching career, I realised (not only on my own; this message was quite strongly pushed by fellow teachers/seniors/school leaders) that my real duty wasn’t to the students as I saw it, but rather to the organisation. Ultimately, the organisation, not the students, decided how much of my work was valued. And this is a very real problem.
When someone tells you to do admin instead of working on teaching, what they’re really saying (or at least, what you subconsciously hear) is that they value your admin work more than your teaching work. I remember having to resign myself to delivering “merely OK” levels of pedagogy because I had to focus on things that I didn’t want to do, that I was bad at doing, but which the organisation said was more important than doing a good job.”
On “insulting” solutions proposed by MOE
“Teachers say that they wish they could focus on teaching, and MOE says that they want to reduce the marking-load. While marking isn’t fun, it’s part of teaching. I didn’t necessarily enjoy marking hundreds of essays at one shot, but I never felt that it didn’t have value. In fact, if I didn’t mark as much, how could I claim to understand my students’ competencies and weaknesses? What made marking really awful was having to mark before the holidays came, and at the same time have to plan/organise non-academic holiday activities. Why not provide teachers with a better marking environment/timeline by removing the superfluous activities?
But no, instead MOE’s response to teachers not doing enough teacher-stuff, is to remove some of the teacher-stuff they don’t mind doing. Presumably so that they can give them even more non-teaching stuff that they will hate doing.”
