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FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES OR PASSING EXAMS: WHICH SHOULD BE THE PRIORITY

In the public school system, you find for example in my class that about twenty of the twenty-four learners in my class could not read. The reality is the fact that we have around nine subjects in a day to cover and you have bi-weekly tests to do, assignments that you must give, find a way to mark, and of course curriculum which you have to exhaust.

One is now caught between which should be the priority for the teacher, I under that the best logical thing to do is try and focus energy on the fact that eleven-year-olds cannot identify two-letter words and automatically cannot read but here you remember that teaching reading takes a lot of time then you find out that some of them cannot properly write the alphabets, then you see some who have issues putting the alphabets together to make a sound, there are others who have issues numerically or need help all round and then the teacher is out-rightly exhausted!

So if you decide that today instead of following the usual timetable of subjects I would just use like an hour to cover reading so that the children get the daily "pick me ups" that they desperately need. But then you find out that that one hour is a time allotted to basic science which of course the children have no idea about, and then you have that work waiting to get done.

Okay so I decided to come one hour earlier every day so that I spend the one-hour teaching reading and phonics which would mean that I wake up an hour earlier and also convince the children to come an hour earlier, it's so easy to say but it's not that easy if you have to convince children to be in school by 6:30am. Even when you convince them half the class still shows, up an hour later with the excuse that their parents didn't prepare on time, now the teacher is left stranded and stressed.

Miss Agnes in the home of one of her pupils

Okay the teacher decides to do an after-school class, this time should be easier because we could just speak to parents coming to pick up their kids to just let them do an hour of work before they leave, but now we have children who have to go and hawk later in the day after school as a means of livelihood, so are we to leave them out of what we are doing?

After all this stress, we wake up to the news of the standardized exams coming up in three weeks where the learners have to prove that they have fully covered and understood the contents of the curriculum, At this point, the teacher is out-rightly confused, and depressed.

 

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