The pandemic has cause a tremendous amount of learning loss. It means, time has gone and students ain’t do nothing at home or in community. Home schooling is 1st and should remain a constant especially in high school and primary school. High schoolers learning in community from people with knowledge and skills to share has the potential to reform education by unburdening the teacher. A lot of learning was and still is being lost on the shift system because there just isn’t enough time and the pressure to patch up the potholes in the students learning is applied almost always on the tired teacher only. Teaching is hard, not heroic. We are just tired working hard in an increasingly inhuman system with more assigned task daily. Teaching is NOT heroic, is just hard these days. 1. The Teacher and learner don’t have enough time. We never did but this shift is crazy and seeing that the teacher is working all day she is not really on shift. 2. Limited time means certification is valued over learning. Deh ain’t going know a thing but they will get a nice certificate. Curriculum accomplished. 3. Every day is 1000 different interruptions. They pop up like cookies, always unwanted and 5 more task for the teacher to do. A teacher is a full time data collecter, secretary, Parent and truancy officer 4. The discipline issues. 5. Teacher shortage. Yesterday I got to work at 7:30am. That’s a half an hour early, and left work at 7:30pm to ensure 5th formers have practice time and I can get some work done on register and data collection from the teachers concerning students. Practice time for visuals arts. You can compromise learning but you can’t completely abolish it due to lack of classroom time. They need to understand how to solve the problems in SBA, it’s needed to they remember simple things like how to make green from two colours. I was wearing my socks extra pretty ones while teaching. Teaching is hard not heroic and I care enough to do something about it. What I am doing is telling a well concealed truth. I am adding a teachers voice to a conversation in education we are almost always excluded from – or spoken to about, but never engaged or included. Sometimes we are propped up and given a script to say something nice for social media. Leading where I am. Teaching is hard, not heroic an allowance of teacher leadership and policy might help. Or maybe we start to do school differently.
