Holiday tuitions mania ? removing the veil | Zambia Daily Mail

?THROUGH this craze for holiday tuitions, teachers are laying bare the fact that they have become less effective and very inefficient in their discharge of duty during normal teaching sessions.?

CHATTING EDUCATION with KENNETH CHIMESE
BANNERS are flying outside most schools in parts of the country. Newspaper pages are carrying advertisements with one common message. Similar advertisements can be heard running on both radio and television. ?Intensive Holiday Tuitions?! The whole nation is gripped with the holiday tuition fever. It is a holiday tuitions craze, once again.
This holiday tuitions mania, for that is what it has become, is a culture that is being embraced by all and sundry. Previously tuitions used to be for examinations classes only, and for children who teachers felt were lagging behind; with the latter being for remedial purposes only. And no payment of money was involved. This has completely changed. Even four-year-old children preparing to attend interviews for entry into Reception class have to attend private tuition! Crazy! Unbelievable!
This column takes a position that the growing practice by teachers and schools to offer extra lessons and private tuitions as a norm is in fact a veil behind which the so many ills and shortcomings in schools are hidden. Through this craze for holiday tuitions, teachers are laying bare the fact that they have become less effective and very inefficient in their discharge of duty during normal teaching sessions. The teachers, through their students, cannot any more record good results without holiday tuitions!
Tuitions are an extra cost for the pupils who have already paid the full school fees for attending a particular school. Some children come from poor families and cannot afford the holiday tuition fees required. What will the teachers do for such children, particularly now that teachers want us to believe holiday tuitions are essential for the success of a student? There is no plan for poor children. Fact!
There is also the aspect of fatigue on the part of both students and teachers. These teachers have not become such super workers that they can teach from 2nd January to 30th November each year. Students also need a break from school. That is why school holidays are there everywhere in the world. Students are not in employment like their fathers or mothers, who have to take annual leave! Attending holiday tuitions leaves the children literally burnt out. Principles of good teaching practice advocate sufficient breaks between periods of instruction. Our schools are not allowing for this.
Holiday tuitions are being used by teachers to raise extra money for themselves. Some school heads ask their teachers to contribute to the head teacher a percentage of what the teacher earns from tuitions done at the school. These schools are guilty of making the cost of education higher.
By the way, when will the toilets, furniture and fittings, including buildings, undergo maintenance? An ideal school does this during the holidays when teachers are not working and students are at home. School infrastructure remains in a state of disrepair since schools are now operating 24/7, 365 days like a copper mine, or ZESCO.
Steeped as teachers get into private tuitions, and as examinations draw near, the possibility of teachers giving in to the temptation to aid their special students cannot be ruled out. The teacher will want to ensure that all the children who attended his extra lessons perform ?to expectation?. Some teachers even have had to ?doctor? examination results at the school to favour students whom they gave extra lessons to. Such teachers will do everything to find out what questions will be in the exams, and ?coach? their students! By the way, even at national examinations level, the same teachers are the ones who set the questions! And so, behind the veil of holiday tuitions, a stage for examination malpractices is being constructed!
With holiday time being lost to tuitions, siblings are left with less time to interact with each other at home as family. As children grow up they need to spend sufficient time at home. A family is a good socialising unit. Too much school leaves parents with less time to see their children grow. Of course working parents may not see the difference. But even for them, especially in cities, tuitions will mean parents have to continue taking their children to school, providing packed lunch and juice endlessly. Costly and strenuous.
Children attending a boarding school are made to stay on for holiday tuitions. The bond between family and such children becomes even more detached. For such children, home is a distant world, with less influence on them. Parents of especially girl students must be aware that their daughters may be receiving extra lessons from male teachers at hours that are awkward, and when the school is deserted!
Schools and teachers may have reasons for pressing for holiday tuitions, but Chatting Education argues that there is enough ground on which such schools and teachers should be accosted. Such schools are no longer the good schools that they used to be. For without holiday tuitions, their results would be poor. Meaning, the teachers are not effective. They are not efficient. They have been wasting school time. They have failed to develop expected skills and impart relevant knowledge (in the pupils) in the thirteen weeks each term.
We will not look beyond Zambia. But why are there no holiday tuitions at most of the top private schools in the country? Why do teachers in such schools never advise their parents, even when a child is struggling, that extra lessons are necessary? Shouldn?t parents demand a plausible explanation from schools which invite their children to attend holiday tuitions? What do the head teachers do about teachers who claim that they should offer holiday tuition to ?revise? or ?complete the syllabus?? Why isn?t revision time planned for in the schemes of work for the term? Why aren?t examination type questions done during the term? What does the school hope to do for children who will not attend the holiday tuitions?
Holiday tuitions can only be taken as an indicator of the educational ills in most schools. Staff at schools which pride themselves in ?intensive holiday tuitions? must be regarded as being inefficient. They have teachers who do not adhere to effective teacher planning and have weak supervisors. Schools offering holiday tuitions need to address the factors that hinder teachers? effectiveness and efficiency during their delivery of lessons. Find out why they fail to complete the set work in the scheme of work.
If the motivation for holiday tuitions is earning more money by the teachers, which Chatting Education believes is, then the teachers should just continue to lobby for better salaries and (especially private school teachers) sell their skills in exchange for a higher pay. The culture of teachers allowing themselves to be ?employed? by parents through extra lessons engagements only serves to lower the teacher?s status. It places the teacher in a compromised situation as the parent will expect from the teacher nothing short of excellent results, which the teacher will have failed to deliver during normal class teaching.
Even teachers who move from one child?s home to another offering extra lessons, or spend hours in the school doing private tuition, are taxing themselves too much. This makes them less efficient and too heavily reliant on the money they may be getting from the parents. They forgo efficiency and effectiveness in the classroom. The child also becomes too dependent on the tuition teacher they will not develop good scholarly skills. Some children who are given extra lessons in their own homes may begin to treat the teacher just like another domestic worker at home.
Chatting Education cannot see why there should be such a mania regarding ?intensive holiday tuitions?. Fact is, there are schools with teachers who do not offer extra lessons or holiday tuitions and these schools are succeeding!
For Comments: kennethchimese@yahoo.co.uk or sms 0966902506

Source: http://www.daily-mail.co.zm/?p=10331

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