A TUTOR AND A HALF

So this week I got to just appreciate how things have changed and are still changing over time when it comes to how we perceive education. In the 60s when my mom was born, it is safe to say that education was not a do-or-die affair. There were only a few graduates and by the time my mom became an adult, western education was so rampant that those who had been able to go to school got white-collar jobs as soon as they were graduating making it easy for them to work their way through the ranks of the civil service and lead decent lives unlike those who didn’t go to school.   When I was a child, considering the opportunities my mom thought she missed out on, she swore that she would do everything in her power to make sure her children were educated. So though my parents weren't literate, they pushed me and my siblings to get the knowledge we required to be successful scholars, they paid for tuition, competitions, extracurricular activities, textbooks and, etc.  Agnes Onyekwere in...

Taking a look at the current state of the public schools in Nigeria, it’s almost impossible to think that there was a time when things were different. Today, we hear a lot of seniors, especially our parents, speak about the fact that back then parents preferred to send their kids to public schools than private schools. Mr. Michael Ukiwe-Otisi is a professional educator and Consultant with 25 years of teaching experience and 15 years of School Administration. He is presently the Principal of Bomas Academy (High School), a High School he co-founded with other principal partners and this is a chit-chat with him on what our education system used to look like and the way forward. A.  Was the government more responsible back then than it is now?   During my time, private schools were almost non-existence, that's not to say they were not there but they were insignificant. I particularly can't remember any private primary school while I was within that age bracket. It will be difficul...

  THE FLOG OR NOT TO FLOG DEBATE FROM A PSYCHOLOGIST’S POINT OF VIEW INTRODUCTION: “I was flogged and I turned out fine”. “Our parents dealt with us and that’s why we are better off today!”. I have heard these statements countless times. But in reality, are you really fine? Are you better off today? I mean emotionally and psychologically? Let’s look at it deeply. Can you handle your emotions without having outbursts or meltdowns? What do your relationships look like? How do people close to you feel about your presence? Do you respect your body? How do you treat children? Do you need substances to cope? How about your self-esteem and self-perception? How about how you speak to yourself? Fine can mean many things. It can mean you are just living on the edge as a teacher, parent or caregiver. So did flogging really make you better or damage you emotionally? If correction (discipline, and not punishment) is the goal, then we must reconsider the place and use of flogging in classrooms a...

  5. "STORYTELLING USING SOCIAL MEDIA IS A WALK IN THE PARK" One thing that would stand you out in your storytelling journey is the ability for you to stay consistent, the algorithms will only favour you if you show up and do the work so it's not about you coming around only when you have a content you want everyone to see or when you take a selfie that was a "banger", it means that you'll need to show up even on days that you’re not sure of yourself or not confident of your content. Good thing consistency is a universal principle so we don't have to talk too much about it. One thing that works for me is the fact that I create a posting structure, at this point, I have a commitment to post daily which I don't quite recommend to everyone but because I am trying to hold myself accountable and meet up to a target for my daily blog I show up on a daily but if I am to suggest a weekly structure I would advise for like a one-day-in one-day-out kind of stru...

4.  "POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA EQUATES TO PUTTING YOUR PERSONAL LIFE ON DISPLAY" This is what it is- A Myth! It's so not true. I have a mantra I stick to when going about my storytelling business and that is the fact that when it comes to my work and passion I'm definitely going to loud it on social media, you cannot be my friend on Facebook or Instagram and not know what I do because most of the things I post on these platforms would be about my life's work. When it comes to personal stuff I have boundaries I set for myself, I am free to post myself on a trip-related vacation or a selfie of myself attending an educative event but it's really rare for me to post a picture of my family just doing our regular stuff or just hanging out, but if it's a picture of my dad and it's linked to a story on underserved education, then it's a great post for me. Students of Emmanuel Anglican Primary School 1 I take my social media life very seriously to the point w...

3.  "STORYTELLING IS SHOWING OFF": This is something educators more than a lot of professions have to deal with. We believe that one of the ethics of the profession is being content with doing your job without expectations of a reward or at most with the hope of a reward in later life. You know, as an educator who is trying to build a brand and name for yourself, you'll occasionally need to sometimes pause and take pictures or make a video of what you're doing so that you can have real-time evidence to back up your story as you tell it but now here's the problem, you start to get gazes from colleagues that suggest that you're being vain or not taking your job as seriously as you should, trust me, I know how that feels, I say forget them!  Students participating in a drawing competition When you start reaping all the benefits that come from putting yourself out there, they're the ones who would start to come to you for tips when you start receiving scholars...

  There are very popular myths around storytelling in the education space and I am here to debunk or validate some of them for us. 1.  "Social Media is not meant for me" : I promise you, we were all comfortably sitting on this table some time ago, I can't believe I used to tell myself things like social media isn't for me. Dear teacher, now I sit down and I regret why it took me so long, imagine how much more I would have achieved if I had just started earlier on. So these days when I hear educators tell me " I am not active on social media, I have accounts but I can't remember the passwords, I haven't gone online for a long time, I just go on social media to check other people's updates" I know that you are occupying a position I left a few months ago. Agnes Onyekwere in a podcast A while ago, I started a mentorship class for educators and one thing that I made sure to do was ensure they all dusted off their social media handles, when I asked ev...

  At this point I can say that I have been in the education space for more than four years now and it seems the first two years were totally different from the last couple of years and to be honest, I owe it to being intentional. Initially, when I started, I would just do my best in class, research my topics, write my plans, and try to show up to school early. I can acknowledge that I did fun and creative things in my classroom but I was content with just serving my class and being fulfilled that I was able to do my job to the best of my ability. Did I make impact? Yes I did, I was able to influence my classroom and others within my physical sphere of influence and I learned the art of self-leadership and self-motivation. Sukanmi in his new School Uniform  Fast forward to the later two years, I become more conscious about what I wanted to achieve with the space I was in, I wanted every second to count and I was ready to put in the work. So apart from all the work I was doing i...

  For Educators, there's always more and more work to do, it's almost as if one task gives birth to another. As we mark scripts and results roll out, we are already seeing aspects we need our kids to improve on and whether we like it or not, we know the work that is already cut out for us. In as much as I would love to say I want educators to rest and invest in their well-being during this break time, I want us to also find little time to do one thing a day that helps your work become better and more efficient in the term to come. Personally, I'll suggest nothing more than an hour or two every day for intentional development. Ms Agnes Onyekwere, Favour and Marvelous What's your goal for next term, yes, I promise you it's not too early. For me, I intend to make more discoveries as I help battle pupil reading inability in my classroom. As the holidays begin, I write down the progress I have made and the strategies I used to achieve this progress. I start to research a...

No matter how much we love your angels, this is the point where we take a break, re-strategize and come back stronger. For once in many weeks, they'll be in your face for hours, and as usual, we all know it's a two-way straight filled with joy, fulfillment as well as exhaustion. Dear parent, even as your kids come back home for the holidays, remember that you're their number one cheerleader, make your kids feel like they belong and their flaws which everyone else points out doesn't matter when they're with you. Agnes Onyekwere-Patris Radio/Jos During the course of the term, educators notice all forms of antisocial, self-esteem, and several degrees of social-emotional issues with loads of children, these, they pick up at different spaces, as educators we do our best to make out kids believe in themselves but our effort alone cannot do the magic. This is a big deal because the only true obstacles are the ones we place by ourselves, if we have kids who do not believe t...

To be honest, that's one question I can't stop asking myself. If today, every teacher gets to pick the job of their dreams, how many teachers will still pick the teaching profession? If this was to miraculously happen, I can bet that the next day, our students will have no teachers in their classes. This provokes a lot of questions, can we ever get to the point where our teachers would rather be in class than anywhere else in the world? Is paying teachers their entitlements or an increase in payment the way out? How can we build a formidable workforce in the public space? Are there still extremely passionate public school teachers? What can we do to avoid teacher frustration and exhaustion on the job? How can we motivate passionate teachers? What strategies can we use to effectively plug out the bad eggs? Teachers at the Ijebu-Ode debate competition As an optimist, I believe that we still have people who can stand to choose the teaching profession anytime anyway but we must be ...

  It's yet another end of the term, and whilst we do our best to clear our tables, mark our scripts and compile our results, we all know that injustices have been done, it may not look like it but, that's where it begins. To think that most of the time it's a collective effort between teachers, school heads, and even parents. I cannot understand why parents would want to pay for a teacher to pass a child who's not supposed to pass, I'm trying to understand how that's supposed to help that child. cultural day Teachers who think that they'll have a better chance at showing off their "excellent" results if only they are able to pad up the scores to look great. Headteachers and principals who call their subject teachers to their office to persuade and or coerce them to increase the student scores because the results are looking bad this term. So instead of holding our learners and children to higher standards, we're asking them comfortable where th...

  Before our beloved seniors in the profession come for me, I would like to start by saying that there's so much to learn from the older teachers and no matter how much we want to go all 21st century on them, there are professional principles that cannot change and who else to pass them or hand them to the next generation of teachers if not them? Though there are certain observations I have made so far working in a public school with more people who have climbed the forty-five age ladder. 1. It's harder for them to embrace change: An older Headteacher would be the one who would have issues with you rearranging the class seats for aesthetic purposes, to them, that doesn't affect or impact learning, all they want is for you to do you job, write your lesson plan and come to school early, he or she has little to no interest in how creativity or even technology can advance learning. If they don't understand it then it should not be implemented I have however also seen older ...

  Personally, to be honest, lesson planning is one very tedious part of my job as a teacher, many teachers won't say anything about this but trust me, I am sure that this feeling represents the feeling of the majority of teachers. Most of us have just come to accept and cope with it as a very pertinent part of our jobs that we can't do without. I am not sure which part is the most tedious, I think for me, I don't like the idea of writing pages and pages of handwritten material, and because I am very expressive it also reflects in my lesson plan, so you can imagine how much work my hands have to do. Robotics programme at Emmanuel Anglican Primary School 1 Italupe, Ijebu-ode The most annoying part for me is the areas where you repeat every single week, most of the time, lesson plans have a template that is a guide for everyone in an organization to follow, now these parts have to show up in your lesson plan every week. Imagine rewriting this every week instead of just copying...

  I can understand the fact that the student has a part to play in the process of learning and all that. Though I think that that role the student has to play becomes more and more influenced by external factors the lower that child falls in the socio-economic ladder. I feel that it is unfair to blame a child who has to follow his or her parents to farm or hawk on the street three times in five school days for failing at the end of the term, especially if it is tied to that child meeting his or her survival needs like food and water. Aishat on the international day of the girl child The public school space is a place where the student is blamed, flogged, and castigated for failing when indeed most if not all failures within the Nigerian public school space should be shared, It should be shared because it is the responsibility of the government to provide a conducive environment for students to thrive but No! Our pupils are sitting on the floor or on worm-infested chairs just to acc...

  If you are one of those teachers who are concerned about the academic and non-academic welfare of their learners, you swing into action when you observe a need amongst your pupils and you're always ready to do or go a little extra just for your students, then chances are that by now you must have had so many reasons why you should just stop and throw in the towel, I mean, legitimate reasons! Every day I remind myself of the reasons why I shouldn't give up and give in, despite feeling unappreciated and overworked most of the time, despite getting setbacks for ideas I propose that's to take the children to the next level of their lives, despite getting the "this isn't going to last" smile all the time and the side talks that are deliberately made for me to hear. I remind myself that by the mere reason of meeting me, the lives of these children have changed. I tell myself of how many times I have tried to be there for them genuinely even if I had to sacrifice s...

  I grew up not just hearing this saying and also believing it, but you know as you grow up you start to unlearn and relearn. This question stems from my experience in the education space, especially the public schools. A colleague of mine spoke to me about her experience of a parent who came to school to warn the teacher who had seized the phone she bought for her son, on getting to the staff room she told the head teacher to warn the teacher in question never to seize her son's phone again as she got him the phone so he would start learning the ropes in the "yahoo-yahoo" (illegal internet fraud) business. Winners of the first round of the Ijebu-Ode debate competition. The woman even took her time to explain how her neighbor's son who dropped out of school is already building a house for his mum from the proceeds of the business and she wants him to tutor her son so that he would take them out of poverty since she was a widow with four children to cater for. After we...