adminFredrick Qaphelani Mabikwa Successful Solutions
I WANT to conclude my series of articles I have been doing for our dear professionals – the teachers. On the advent of the May Day this year I did an article I dedicated to our beloved teachers. We all came from teachers and the importance of these professionals need not be over emphasised.
The teacher has the mammoth task of making a person out of the human being. There is however some bad apples within our teachers that have tarnished the image of this noble profession. In the recent past I also did an article on “Bad workplace habits”. Some of the issues I raised in that article might have touched on the teacher but these were more general and in this article I want to focus specifically on the teacher.
Uncleanliness
The teacher’s job is not only to teach the curriculum but to make a person out of the human being as I have already said. You want to instill certain values in your students which include general good deportment and cleanliness. Now for you to talk to students about cleanliness, you have to be clean yourself. I am sorry to say this but I have seen some dirty teachers. You find a male teacher wearing a shirt on two/three consecutive days and the white collar has turned brown. It is important for the teacher to be smart and kempt all the time. Smartness does not mean wearing different attire for each day of the month but smartness is keeping those few clothes clean.
You find a teacher doesn’t use roll on, perfume or deodorant and is going about instructing students with the armpit over the students’ faces and is smelling of sweat, this is killing the students who can’t complain. They suffer in silence. There is need for the teacher to always look smart to show the students how to dress. The teacher is their role model. You find a teacher has one yellow tie which he wears with all shirts, even the day he wears his red shirt. This is when students give you a nickname “King Yellow” and you cry. There is the keeping of the bushy beard by some male teachers. A clean shave is recommended and if the teacher has a good reason to keep a beard it must be smart and well trimmed.
For the ladies, the dressing has to be always decent and not revealing. If you dress like a misguided teenager, the boys in the school will treat you like a misguided teenager and you cry that they are not respecting you. You are addressed by the way you are dressed. An attempt must be made at matching colours/clothes. Don’t just dress to cover the stomach and the buttocks. You find a teacher is all colours of the rainbow like a Christmas tree. I don’t know maybe this is what is called colour blocking these days.
Bad punctuality
There are those teachers with the habit of entering the school through the “small gate” (the care takers’ gate).Always enter through the main gate. Bad punctuality is one of the worst “crimes” a teacher can commit. I have never seen an organised teacher whose punctuality is bad. Be punctual to school, lessons and meetings.
In most schools students are based and it is the teachers who go to the students’ bases. Some teachers take too long to get to the bases. Some teachers even take up to 10 minutes to get to their class. Imagine a teacher has four single lessons per week and takes up to 10 minutes to get to the base. Most lessons are 40 minutes and if you take 10 minutes to get to the base, it means that for the week 40 minutes is lost which is exactly one lesson. So the teacher is teaching 3 lessons instead of 4 per week, losing 25percent of his teaching time walking to the students’ base. This is how bad it is.
We have teachers who disrespect meetings. You find a teacher walking into a staff meeting when the meeting is half way. Some immature teachers think it’s being a hero walking into a meeting late, showing off the new borrowed attire.
Some do it deliberately to pitch unnecessary fights with the headmaster and the headmaster embarrasses you by just looking at you and saying nothing. For some lateness has moved from being a habit to a culture. You are looking for a fellow teacher at around 0800hrs at school and you are told, “ . . . so and so arrives around 0815hrs”.This is very bad. The biggest irony I saw in my teaching career was that most of these teachers who are the last to arrive at school are the first to leave.
Moodiness
When we have had issues at home or in the staff room that have depressed us let us not as teachers bring these to the students. The students must not suffer because of our unresolved issues. Some teachers are well known to be moody and when “it’s partly cloudy” the students even know. You are not teaching, you are so irritable shouting at students for very minor things and calling them all sorts of names. Students are even afraid of talking to you and when they do, sometimes you ignore them. I always suggest that if you are emotionally unstable to teach just take leave and go and resolve your issues first. Don’t empty out your issues on the students, they have nothing to do with your problems.
Deliberate absenteeism and “bunking” lessons
For some teachers deliberate absenteeism from school is a culture. You find someone is burying a relative every week. They are always bereaved. With the incidence of death these days, can you honestly work if you decide to bury all your relatives and friends who die? Some teachers are prone to false illness. Any minor ailment, they go and request off days from the doctor. For some teachers the child is always “ill” and this is good excuse not to come to school. Now the problem with teaching is that, it is not like other jobs like digging trenches, where someone can dig your trench in your absence. When you are always absent, the bad results of your class will show to your embarrassment.
At high school some teachers will be at school and they just decide not to go and teach a certain class. I have seen students coming to fish out teachers from the staff room. And because they were not prepared to teach, the students get a test and the books or papers for such unplanned tests are usually lost or marked by other students in what is called “peer marking”. Peer marking is when students mark their own books and it’s a hobby for lazy teachers.
Some teachers disappear from the school through the “small gate” and they are not seen till the next day. I saw at some school I taught a Science teacher who when the small gate was closed he would jump over the durall wall and get away. I am not exaggerating. Imagine the damage to your person when students see you jumping over the durall wall.
Drunkenness
I did say in my article “Workplace bad habits” there were these young teachers at a school I taught who would have “coke” at tea time when everyone else was having tea. Again they were teaching Science and they would bring this coke from their labs. Come lunch time they are in high spirits, shouting on top of their voices. They were not drinking coke, it was “coke plus”, coke diluting alcohol. How do you teach under the influence of alcohol? This is when we hear that teachers said unprintable things in class; a teacher folded the breasts of female students and all. Some teachers cannot handle alcohol. Come official school activities, formal parties, they drink and cannot control their actions and mouths and they vomit all the alcohol to the disgust of other teachers. Teachers go with students on a trip and they drink and become a nuisance at the grounds and in the bus. One teacher fell off a moving bus playing monkey when they were drunk. What kind of a role model is this?
Gossiping
Again a culture for some teachers. At primary school, you find a teacher is hardly in their class, they are in other people’s classes gossiping. When the headmaster is away they actually draw other teachers outside to bask in the sun in this winter and chat the day away. You find someone at school has a bad reputation of gossiping and they are always called to the offices to explain some of their gossip. What kind of a teacher is this? That teacher always has the latest and the hottest news in the school. It’s them who know everyone’s privacy and in some cases they share other teachers’ privacy with students. This is very bad. There is a myth that gossiping is for women .This is not true. I know a male deputy head who is the chief gossiper in the school. You are a leader but you are the chairperson of the “GC” (gossiping club). Gossip kills the workplace if it goes out of control.
To be continued . . .
Online Reporter