IF EVERY TEACHER WERE TO GET THEIR DREAM JOB TODAY - HOW MANY TEACHERS WILL WE HAVE LEFT?

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 mindful of how disappointingly few they are, which means those few people are the only ones helping every day to ensure we do not lose the fight against education inequality and I really hope that the effort of these individuals is not just a drop in a mighty ocean

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HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR

HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR Looking at my life right now, I cannot help but be reminded of my dad. Nnana was what we called him. He was a very quiet man, keeps to himself, didn’t have friends, at least none that we knew of. Right now I remember him telling us stories of how his journey started, at that point my siblings and I were not really interested in those stories seeing how we roll our eyes when he starts giving us one of the stories, we always got one of those anytime we did something wrong-that was one of his punishment strategies. I really don’t know if it’s me who is missing him or there’s just a lot of things to learn from the life of my dad as it connects to my job as an educator. My father was never really predictable, except of course with his stories. We were not sure what he would do next and was never a fan of always using the cane. My mom was the typical Nigerian mom, everything was a weapon to massively destroy your bad behavior-the c...

Teaching 9-10 Subjects per day: A blessing or a Curse.

The moment I started teaching my first lessons in my placement school, I knew from that moment that I was only going to be racing against time and the structures put in place to facilitate normal academic activities. Personally, I liked to access the situation of things with my learners before I go ahead to figure out what the best approach for a particular topic would be and since I was sure that most of my learners in primary 4 should be sent back to primary 1 I knew that there was a lot of work cut out for me. Before I start my class I try to research a topic online, I go on YouTube and try to find out very simple ways of teaching division to little kids. With this my kids are always surprised how simple Maths can be when I'm the one who is teaching it because the methods I use are at the level they understand and can relate to, this makes my learners feel like this school thing is not as hard as they thought. But the other side to it is the fact that my methods will usually tak...

PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS TEACHING MULTIPLE SUBJECTS. YEH/NEH

If you are a primary school teacher and you teach more than one subject raise your hand. Do you have subjects you know you have to do more research on before you feel confident teaching them? Do you sometimes feel the need to recheck and double-check things in one or more subjects compared to others? Are there subjects you have outright joy and confidence teaching compared to others? Are there times you wish you just stick to some of these subjects instead of having to pack up everything? To be honest, I understand that most school facilities cannot afford to pay individual teachers to handle each subject, I understand that they expect primary school teachers to know and understand the basic subjects well enough to teach them at preliminary levels, BUT! Are we experimenting with the next generation of Nigerians or are we giving them the best that there is? Our pupils deserve to have the best from every teacher and a teacher can only be his best self if he is teaching what he feels...

A TUTOR AND A HALF

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