Looking at the bottom of society

Not all is well in this garden city.

I went back to NIE for 'lesson' today, and what we actually did was to sit around talk about our experiences during Practicum. The more entertaining accounts are, sadly, those from the lousier schools, and my classmates will tell us one atrocious things after another about the school or the students.

We all know there are schools in which teachers hope they wouldn't end up in, and parents hope their kids wouldn't be sent to. These places are hotbeds for discipline problems, with the recalcitrant students influencing others to defy the school authorities by example. These are the places where the police comes regularly, where parents get called down to office often, and where hope of academic excellence rests solely on the effective enforcement of discipline on the students.

We can't blame teachers for wanting to avoid these teaching hells, where maintaining discipline is the biggest task and lessons can pass without time for any teaching to be done. The kids often have families with their own set of overwhelming problems, and we can't expect to change them too; I only hope that intellectual maturity will set in soon to make them think right.

And I look at this dismal state of affairs and I realised that often, I'm there to help shape their character for the better, more than anything else. Schools are only interested in examination statistics, so it's up to us teacher to do the only thing we can do for them.