By Anonymous Teacher And Mother Of Two
Being a school teacher, I can tell you our education system is a failure.
Most of the school teachers are bogged down with too many students and too much non-teaching workload. When I was a trainee teacher years ago, this problem was already surfaced. MOE and NIE's response was that if we only want to teach then we should resign and go be private tutors. Teachers are expected to do a lot more than just teach knowledge and basic moral values.
If our schools are only thought to be focusing on teaching academics, then our schools are already failures. As parents, how many of your kids, especially in secondary school and junior college, flunked half their subjects in their recent midyear exams? Are you aware that over half the students failed at least one subject such as English, Humanities or Maths? It is probably a lot worse for those in the Normal Academic and Normal Technical Stream? Those of you with children in secondary schools and junior colleges can attest to this.
School teachers are all too busy with their admin work and CCAs or handling disciplinary issues from students with bad attitude. School leaders solution is to quietly nudge parents to find private tuition. Newspapers strategically interview students who are good and can cope on their own, ignoring the vast majority of students who either get tuition or are doing so badly that they need tuition.
My husband and I work long hours in different schools, but the rotten culture in both schools are the same. School leaders focus more on non-teaching aspects to drive their own promotions and performance bonus, while those who can teach well and want to focus on teaching well continue to be penalised and placed at the bottom of the ranking.
Our younger son is of average ability in secondary three. He failed Additional Math in his midyear exams. So did his elder brother. It turned out that 3/4 of their cohort failed it too at the midyear exam. We also are teachers. We don't want to blame their teachers because we know how busy we all are. We are stretched in all directions, and teaching well is not a key priority for career success even though touted so. We sent our son for tuition, and we are shocked to find that many students from the top independent schools and band-one schools also need tuition for their Math. I talked to some of them and their parents at the tuition class. They said that if they didn't have tuition, they probably would have failed or done a lot worse for their midyear exams.
That seems to be the state of our education system. Even as an exam-crazy system, our system is not able to function well on its own without parents pumping in external money in the form of tuition. Even groups like Mendaki and Sinda also offer free tuition to the students under their care. Why would they do so, if the education system was sufficient enough?
More at
https://www.domainofexperts.com/2014/06/local-school-teacher-and-mother.html
