adjunctteacher: July 1, 2014 at 10:30 pm (Quote) Teaching is supposed to be an ‘iron’ rice bowl, supposedly with long holidays in June and December. My friends in the private sector usually like to tease me about the ‘privileges’ that I have as a teacher. But the fact is that many teachers are leaving in spite of these ‘privileges’. Teaching is also one of those professions where many teachers are actually not interested in promotions to be a school leader. It is an anomaly. Try asking how many people in the private sector are not keen in promotion, and the pay raise that comes with it. Some get promoted to be school leaders. Some are good leaders. Majority who are promoted, principals included, are the wrong people to get promoted. They get promoted simply because most of the good people don’t want the job. Look at some of your own school leaders and see if I am wrong. The key problem with the job is the work appraisal. MOE swears by the same promotion criteria used by some of big MNCs that used to be good. The work appraisal ranks workers against their peers, and is supposed to reward the key performers and punish the laggards. Theoretically, that is how it is supposed to work. In reality, this system creates a culture where in order to promote, employees realize it is more effective to bootlick than to work better. They also soon realize that to get promoted faster, it is far more crucial to be SEEN in action than to actually do quality work. Managers also backstab and play politics with each other in order to survive. The system works on fear and paranoia of your peers outdoing you. And you need to do more in order not to be left behind. Such a system does not promote teamwork and cooperation. It promotes fear and selfishness, where you see your colleagues through the eyes of a worried rival. It is common for some schools to deliberately neglect students’ teaching in order to focus on big-ticket items like school concerts, competitions and major school events. The usual lame excuse are for ‘holistic’ development, but the real unsaid reason is for the promotion of ambitious teachers and school leaders. Teachers who leave the service are usually the teachers who had actively participated in such a system and are totally burnt out from the workaholic lifestyle of trying to do all these so-called holistic education duties. Otherwise, they are teachers who sick of seeing people backstab fellow colleagues at work in order to safeguard their own performance bonuses. Some of us pick another path. We resigned as full-time teachers and return to MOE as flexi adjunct teachers, where we can focus on our passion of teaching. Some teachers may scorn us as mere ‘classroom’ teachers. But come on lah, we adjunct teachers are not participants in your school’s office politics. We teach and mind our own business. We don’t have to backstab, tell lies, push blame, curry favour with our superiors and play power games against our colleagues, while maintaining a ‘righteous’ image in front of the students.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 06:55:11 +0000
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