Teachers Are Not To Blame
Some parents appreciated teachers for the first time in their lives. Others blamed them when they discovered that their kids cannot count without a calculator; don’t know that pyramids are in Egypt, Africa not on Google; don’t understand what a paragraph is; don’t know the name of the mayor; don’t know east or west when standing in the middle of an unfamiliar street and the danger of wet hands near anything electrical.
Blaming teachers for gaps in knowledge is caused by amnesia, intentional amnesia if I may add, because knowledge is a circle. Teachers work with what kids have in their lunch boxes. Teachers tighten the bolts, file rough edges and iron wrinkles of knowledge kids imbibed from birth to now, the COVID-19 year.
The circle cracks if home knowledge clashes with school knowledge or if home knowledge is non existent. Religious schools are a good example of the ideal, which is seamless interaction.
Parents send kids to religious schools to reinforce home. Parents pray in a particular manner, so it’s second nature for kids when they are in school. They also know faith symbols because they grew up seeing religious books such as The Bible, The Torah or The Koran at home.
That symbiosis is in short supply in Canada, the United States and Europe, making teaching a very stressful job. For example, it is difficult for women to impart knowledge to kids whose parents have no respect for women.
A father who teaches his sons to be ‘men’ by watching certain websites with him, is not helping the female mathematics teacher. If parents don’t respect black people, black teachers will find it difficult to teach kids that don’t look like them.
Discipline. If kids do not remove their head phones when talking to parents, teachers cannot force them to do so every day. If kids shout at parents, they’ll shout at teachers. That is when learning disintegrates. Teachers stop caring. They come in, do their hours and go home. Society cannot expect them to perform miracles.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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