Whose education is it anyway?

Picture: Pei Chun Public School

Recently, I read Will Fitzhugh’s piece entitled Audience Participation in which he discussed the situation in the US where teachers can be sacked if their students do not perform well. He wondered if it’s really the teacher’s job to motivate students to learn. If you don’t get round to reading the article here, you may find his conclusion worth thinking about (I underlined the key ideas here):

Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers’ problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don’t do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.

Singaporean students work very hard and I don’t doubt that. Well, they have loads of homework from their teachers, private tutors and their anxious mummies. But do they, and do we, believe that students are responsible for their own learning? Or do we blame the schools and teachers when our children don’t do well?

I often describe teaching as a challenging job. It’s easier to sit in a cubicle and type or wrestle with numbers, but try keeping a group of people engaged when they prefer to be out somewhere doing something else.  Teaching is also hard because teachers are expected to not just educate but also entertain as well. I know this because every teaching session for me is always a performance.  Come hell or high water, the show must go on and I must get out there, put on a smile, and do my best.

Keeping teachers engaged is, maybe, a lot harder than engaging students. But I am realistic. I constantly remind myself that teaching is like bowling (so says Charlie Brown, I think). You hit some but you miss a lot along the way. I am only glad to have hit some because I also believe that learning is an individual responsibility. I refuse to take that responsibility for teachers who don’t want to learn, but prefer to mark books, update their Facebook account, text their loved ones or do assorted more interesting or more pressing chores during my classes.  

I know regular teachers don’t always have my choice. To begin with, they are dealing with young people who are often deemed to be, well young, and therefore cannot be responsible for all of their actions. Then they have to deal with these young ones on a regular basis for a year, sometimes even more. You can ignore them for a day, a week, but not for a month or a term. Teachers don’t have the leisure to say, “We refuse to take responsibility for your learning”. But is this always true?

I ask this because I feel teachers take their responsibilities to their students too seriously. Whoa, I can hear all of you saying, “But they should!” Yes, they should, to a certain extent.  Are teachers always responsible for all of their students’ learning? I don’t think so. Students have to do their bit too as do their parents. But, you protest, “Isn’t that what teachers are paid to do?” Well, yes and no. Just because they are paid, doesn’t mean they have to do everything. I’m sure many of our domestic maids are paid too, but they are not expected to do everything for the child or the family.

But as I said, teachers take their jobs very seriously, and this is both a good and bad thing. The good part is that we can always rely on our teachers, but the bad part is that teachers end up doing their share of mollycoddling in school.  And how do we do that in school? Well, I can think of many ways but how about these for a start? Accepting their sloppy work and correcting all the mistakes for them, rewriting their essays so that they can copy these out, and making and printing out copious notes which students will usually put away, to be forgotten as soon as school is over?

I believe that students have a responsibility for their own learning too, and that doing all these things for them will not help learning.  Instead teachers should hold their students responsible for their sloppy work and refuse to mark them until they have shown some effort put into the piece. But alas, teachers can’t do this. Parents will come after them, they tell me. Really, I said. Do parents want teachers to condone sloppy work? Do they want teachers to set low standards for their children? Don’t they want their children to develop good habits of mind without which the A*s are not so easy to come by?   

So whose education is it anyway? Whose exam is it anyway? Since when have teachers become so disempowered that they cannot refuse to accept substandard work? And although a teacher’s worth is sadly judged by the number of A*s her students get, is it always the teacher’s fault if a student does not do well?  

But I know that desperate times require desperate measures. If the students are showing no progress, let’s give them the words, write the essays for them, excuse their shoddy work etc. But does this help them?  I ask this because I used to “help” my son the same way when he was younger. I thought that by filing his papers for him and tidying his desk, he will have more incentive to study. Wrong! He didn’t even notice that I did those things for him and it didn’t increase his motivation one iota. It made me feel useful for a while though. It didn’t take me long to understand that I did those things for me, not for him.

And isn’t it easier to give them the answers than to wait for the kids to cough them up? And after a while, the kids learn what to do to avoid thinking, and they also learn not to be in a hurry to give answers when the impatient teacher has them all at her fingertips.

Teaching is a tough job. Learning is equally tough, and students should also understand that learning often requires struggling and working hard. And we need to impress on them that they are responsible for their own learning, not their teachers, their tutors, or their mummies. Indeed, I would say that this is the one lesson that is seriously worth teaching in the classroom.