UNFAIR TREATMENT OF NEW GRADUATE TEACHERS

Post Courier 22 December 2020

There is a report in the media that new education graduates from recognised colleges will undergo a vetting process before being put on the payroll.

They will be required to have completed the Resumption of Duty Summary Sheet, copies of certificates of teacher registration, teacher training certificates Grades 10 and 12, medical and police clearances.

Provinces have been urged not to recruit until all requirements have been met. The provincial recruiting authority must sight all original certificates.

This may well overcome the fraudulent submission of educational certificates and remove the unqualified  applicants for teaching.

But there are a very false assumptions in seeking to raise the standard of teachers. The first is the assumption that highly qualified people make effective teachers. 

Often the clever teachers are those who can not see where the slower students are having problems. 

They leave the slower students behind by skimming over the more complex work on the assumption that all students know. All students may not know.

If a student achieves a low standard, it may be because the clever teacher has not taught the basics. The low level teacher may do the same.

I completed Grade 12 in Brisbane. I was foolish in choosing the subjects that my friends chose. I passed but not brilliantly. At university I chose subjects that lifted me to distinction level. 

My Maths teacher and Science teacher were brilliantly hopeless. They put summaries on the blackboard and expected us to summarize and understand. I did not.

In Papua New Guinea I believe that I shone as a teacher as I was able to see where the range of slower students could find problems.

The problem with education in Papua New Guinea is that it is all too stupidly complex. Many exam papers are in the form of objective "tick and flick" questions.

So many students graduate to be teachers without knowing the basics. I was a student of the 1960s in Australia and mastered the skills that were then wiped out of the curriculum. 

I believe I have a fabulous memory. What did I have for breakfast this morning? I have forgotten. 

But I give students in PNG the range of forgotten skills in writing. I focus on rhythm phonics that helps students appreciate the rhythm of sentences. I show them how to write elegant and complex sentences.

I teach them derivation of words from Latin and Greek that died in the western world in the 1960s. Not in my memory.

Why does the PNG Department of Education not vet the teachers' college lecturers? And those vetting the new applicants to teaching?

I did not have an cell-phone as a student but read hundreds of books. My vocabulary is very extensive.

I feel sorry for averagely brilliantly applicant teachers who have been rejected in a foolish system that does not recornise the brilliance that may grow in many average teachers.

Many of them may have suffered from the hopelessly incompetent vernacular teaching program of the 1980s. Perhaps their teachers were the ones to suffer and passed the incompetence on to the next generation of teachers.