Society should appreciate teachers now more than ever. Teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic has presented huge challenges. When you think about it, teachers spend more time with children than any other adults in their lives. Each day, we trust teachers with our most valuable resources — our children.
Lt Governor Manoj Sinha and other political persons have appreciated the Teacher's dedication and commitment and their contribution to shape the future of J&K and the country.
Importantly, the role of teachers is laudable for their efforts to impart education to students through online mode during the prevailing pandemic situation that was not so easy to cope with keeping in view the lack of infrastructure available in schools.
Further, since the schools are being considered for opening, teachers have to learn for themselves to provide quality instruction virtually or offline with social-distance norms in the classroom-settings, to wearing masks while teaching and managing a room full of young people while trying to keep everyone safe and healthy. The challenge is not exactly what they trained for, but we are sure the teachers would pull it off in inspiring ways.
Societies all around the world are indebted to teachers, who not only impart academic knowledge but also share ethical values, and imbibes morality that shapes a student's future and through him a nation's.
Teachers deserve our utmost gratitude and respect, the students in particular and society in general should be deferential towards teachers all time.
However, there are other dimensions through which the teacher has to pass that has made him just a tool in the hands of the Schools managements and Administration.
Planning and preparation of lessons – largely from the prescribed textbooks — is expected of any teacher. They also determine the sort of assessments that students have to be prepared for. This, in turn, dictates the tests/examinations designed by teachers. When this chunk of work is done — indeed, even as it is being done — a teacher is expected to prepare students for debates, quizzes, exhibitions, annual day programmes, cultural shows, inter-school competitions, and so on. Attending staff meetings is another requirement: with an agenda mostly set by the school Principal consisting of functional matters such as the school calendar, tackling disciplinary issues, under-performing students, timelines for ‘covering the syllabus', and so on.
It is all mechanical in nature with just one common thread that runs through all of the above tasks i.e. compliance.
The whole available system in our state and India has stereo-typed the Teacher in the conventional way and thus eroded his creative genius in his teaching deliveries.
The plight of teachers in the private education sector is further aspect his exploitation. The teachers working in the private sector have been at the receiving end due to the Covid pandemic and subsequent prevailing SoPs. Most of the teachers in the private sector continue to remain either underpaid or unpaid.
It is the time and need to do away with the discrimination and end the festering pay anomalies faced by the teachers working in private sector at par with that of Govt. School Teachers.
